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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#351

Post by viridian »

prepend wrote: post #36
OJFord wrote: post #4

'permanently suspended' is weird in itself isn't it? Just avoiding the word 'banned' or similar.. but butchering other words into meaning the same thing?

I think this is part of the super annoying to me trend of double speaking to avoid using overtly negative words. “Banned” is a negative word so we don’t want to use that. But we still want to ban you, thus “permanently suspended.” It’s not a new trend as “made redundant” (ie, fired) and “focusing on value” (ie, cancelled your project) are all over press releases and public communication. I think it makes me feel wors…

There's something I find literally evil about describing firing people as reducing the workforce, or rendering a position redundant, but I can't quite put why to words. It downplays human suffering to a degree that's almost unbelievable.

Re: An account was suspended

#352

Post by fleddr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #320
fleddr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New account. So? People create new accounts all the time. How do accounts come into existence? Tweeting out links. So? One of the most basic use cases there are, for example a brand tweeting links to press releases. From multiple locations. So? You mean like every multinational? None of these factors have any smoking gun indicator to decisively and permanently suspend an account. On the other end of the spectrum we h…

This is faulty analysis. Of course not any single one of these things by itself would indicate spam, but a yes, a brand new account that only tweets links, from multinational locations, would probably be spam the vast, vast majority of the time.

The problem is the word "probably". There's no smoking gun, just an increased likelihood. Yet a very definitive conclusion is made prematurely.

Even if you find such entity "spamming" links, it still doesn't meet the more traditional definition of spam. Said account does not notify anybody, does not comment, direct message, it's just self-spamming.

Re: An account was suspended

#353

Post by Stupulous »

Aloha wrote: post #322
MikePlacid wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My trigger was not Russia, it was de-platforming of Parler. I kinda care more about my life in the US and consider political de-platforming an extremely dangerous development. A “trigger” caused by my “living experience” as my son interprets it (but I think it’s more logical than that).

The way I see it, Parler wasn't deplatformed. Parler could have rented a building, bought servers, racked and stacked those servers, networked them and gotten connectivity to the world. They didn't, they leased servers as a service from others, and then got burned when those services decided they were uncomfortable with the vitriolic anonymous speech being hosted on their hardware. Had they truly built their own plat…

And if their office building evicted them, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still buy some land and build their own office; it was their own fault for leasing office space as a service and getting burned. And if their ISP cut their access, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still start their own ISP; had they truly built their own platform, no ISP could have taken that from them. And if the power plant wouldn't give them electricity- okay I'll stop.

Re: An account was suspended

#354

Post by JadeNB »

freejazz wrote: post #312
JadeNB wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive. But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.

Why would you need to do that? You can just have humans review the reports that algorithms generate...

> Why would you need to do that? You can just have humans review the reports that algorithms generate...

At some point, in designing the algorithms, in instructing the human reviewers, and so on, you still need to agree on what abusive means. So there's no way around that.

As to the volume, I agree, one can deploy algorithms as a first filtering step. In this case, I don't usually trust humans to be smarter than algorithms, but I do trust humans to be better at abuse than algorithms are at recognising it—unless the algorithms have so many false positives that they're barely filtering at all.

Re: An account was suspended

#355

Post by tshaddox »

lapcat wrote: post #349
tshaddox wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

daringfireball has 30 tweets in the last 10 days. It's also a 15 year old account with 100k followers. It seems unlikely that any remotely competent spam detection algorithm or human review process would suspect it of being spam.

This is missing the point, which is "The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way." If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone. I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in…

I'm not all that concerned with what Twitter's rules supposedly are. If the only complaint here is that Twitter should be more clear about their rules and/or more consistent in enforcing them, then sure, I can agree with that (although there are obvious reasons why you shouldn't be completely clear about what your exact thresholds are for spam detection).

I'm just talking about what I think looks clearly like spam, and what I think reasonable spam policies would look like. That whole Twitter thread of accusations has now been deleted, so I'm not necessarily addressing the exact text of it. I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.

Re: An account was suspended

#356

Post by insane_dreamer »

1123581321 wrote: post #328
insane_dreamer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a shame that social network apps, which have largely supplanted feed reader apps, never integrated RSS feeds into their products

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. Twitter had RSS support and killed it about a decade ago in pursuit of their strategy to grow by hurting the third party ecosystem that had grown around Twitter. I still find that decision to be disappointing. Some RSS readers support following Twitter accounts, but they use the third party app API. I personally follow Twitter accounts in NewsBlur.

Wasn't being sarcastic, just lamenting the fact that it's not supported in today's social media apps.

Re: An account was suspended

#357

Post by 1123581321 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #356
1123581321 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. Twitter had RSS support and killed it about a decade ago in pursuit of their strategy to grow by hurting the third party ecosystem that had grown around Twitter. I still find that decision to be disappointing. Some RSS readers support following Twitter accounts, but they use the third party app API. I personally follow Twitter accounts in NewsBlur.

Wasn't being sarcastic, just lamenting the fact that it's not supported in today's social media apps.

Gotcha. Sorry. I wish RSS feeds were everywhere, too.

Re: An account was suspended

#358

Post by hellojesus »

panarky wrote: post #279
rjzzleep wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out. You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what…

This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner. He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam. That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution. And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many…

He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity.

It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.

Re: An account was suspended

#359

Post by lapcat »

tshaddox wrote: post #355
lapcat wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is missing the point, which is "The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way." If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone. I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in…

I'm not all that concerned with what Twitter's rules supposedly are. If the only complaint here is that Twitter should be more clear about their rules and/or more consistent in enforcing them, then sure, I can agree with that (although there are obvious reasons why you shouldn't be completely clear about what your exact thresholds are for spam detection). I'm just talking about what I think looks clearly like spam, a…

> I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.

I disagree. Tweeting links without interacting in any way with other accounts is to me clearly not spam.

Re: An account was suspended

#360

Post by morby »

josephcsible wrote: post #288
morby wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. A *private* entity deciding they don’t want to do business with a company because of that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic. More people and businesses should be willing to refuse business to entities that seek to harass, abuse, or promote violence to another group of people. What you’re worried about is governmental…

> There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. Extremists on Twitter often make calls to violence too. Why do we let Twitter stay online and just ban those individuals instead of kicking Twitter offline?

“We” didn’t take parler offline. AWS did, surely after some pressure. In addition to this, Twitter should and is held accountable by society. You can’t possibly have missed the entire debate on its moderation. Of course, twitter also does more to Moderate the content on its site than Parler did which is what got it booted off AWS. Few services want to be associated with radical ideologues spreading violence.
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