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The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

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Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#301

Post by remarkEon »

dmamills wrote: post #198
remarkEon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I agree. Perhaps it’s an issue with the definition of “shadowban”, but I understood it to mean “you tweet, but no one sees”. Letting a user know that their account is in this state for this_reason actually seems like an improvement to me, not an oxymoron.

It's your definition that is misunderstood, not the oxymoron. > Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning or comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

Okay. I guess I'm saying that I think it's dumb when you don't tell the user that their account is in this state.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#302

Post by LightHugger »

krapp wrote: post #29
rhaksw wrote: post #24

Twitter calls it "visibility filtering" [1] Facebook gives mods a "Hide comment" button [2] TikTok calls it "visible to self" [3] [4] Truth Social does it [5] [6] [7] Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8] Open source tools are built to do it [9] [10] Textbooks advocate "disguise a gag or ban" [11] I call it Shadow Moderation [12]. The system intentionally does not show users…

>If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content. I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.

Shadowbanning only works because it is news to people. That's the whole point. People aware of shadowbanning can easily check their posts from a private browser window or similar to see if they exist.

If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#303

Post by rhaksw »

somenameforme wrote: post #221
quadrifoliate wrote: post #125

I have been responsible a bit of content moderation myself, and interacted with mods on various forums. It's possible that this is responsible for some of my views, summarized here. - The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated. I am sure most moderation tools are secret, including whatever Twitter (or for that matter,…

Yes, the secrecy does matter. I think can immediately think of two big reasons: 1) We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said. When censorship is carried out secretly it will inevitably trend towards abuse. One of the examples given in these leaks is that @DrJBhattacharya [1] was secretly put on a trends blacklist because of what he was saying. He's a well spoken doctor and Stanford epidemiolog…

> Yes, the secrecy does matter.

Okay, good start.

> We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said.

What? No. Platforms can censor whatever they want. The point is that users should be told when their content is actioned. Mod actions shouldn't be kept secret from the authors of content.

Therefore, we should be concerned with how platforms are censoring, and not what they are censoring. That is, a platform who tells you when they censor is more desirable than one who keeps their censorship secret from you.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#304

Post by remarkEon »

XorNot wrote: post #252
remarkEon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I agree. Perhaps it’s an issue with the definition of “shadowban”, but I understood it to mean “you tweet, but no one sees”. Letting a user know that their account is in this state for this_reason actually seems like an improvement to me, not an oxymoron.

Letting a user know defeats the point of doing it (also, this is not what Twitter is doing). The point of shadowbans/hellbans as they exist on say, reddit, is to deal with what would be termed criminally as a fixated person. If they know they're banned, they just make a new account, and another one after that, and another one - if they think they can't post they engage in ever more extreme measures to keep doing it.…

>Letting a user know defeats the point of doing it

Why? Isn't this a signal to the broader population that certain behaviors result in this kind of downranking?

>Moderators are a finite resource, and spending all their resources chasing down someone who won't take the hint is exactly what a hellban is for.

Again, it's it useful to signal that accounts that violate the rules (or are right up at the edge of violating them) are in this state?

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#305

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

anigbrowl wrote: post #76
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #46

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

So since their concerned have been proven justified, they don't get to talk about them because of their tone when they first raised the concern? They weren't crying wolf. They were right the whole time, which honestly justifies the howling to me.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#306

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

dotnet00 wrote: post #81
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #46

Quoted post unavailable.

I feel like HN is pretty close to being the most balanced 'techie' social platform I've come across. I very often see discussions here which surprise me in that talking about them on Twitter, Reddit (in a similar community) etc would handily get your post deleted/banned/hidden. One that comes to mind is discussions about vaccine effectiveness data without either polarized extreme being dominant (ie no one acting like…

It only seems balanced to those that agree with its bias.

Which is kinda proven given that I currently can't reply to you because HN is rate limiting me...

FYI: this comment took 3 hours to make

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#307

Post by godelski »

bavell wrote: post #207
godelski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is anyone surprised that the major/globally operating social media companies have extensive internal systems for controlling the content that appears via their platforms? No one is. These Twitter Files are just building on a right wing prior of them being shadow banned. But they have yet to demonstrate that right wingers are specifically targeted. They don't show why these accounts got flagged (the crux of the…

If this[0] is accurate, then 99.7% of political contributions made by Twitter employees went to Democrats in 2022. Is it unreasonable to suspect people on the right are targeted more often than the people on the left? Wouldn't that be the default assumption and the opposite position would need evidence to prove otherwise? [0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&...

> If this[0] is accurate, then 99.7% of political contributions made by Twitter employees went to Democrats in 2022.

You're jumping a step here because you're making a sampling error. Like I said before, we know nothing about the distribution.

Let's put this in an extreme example. Suppose there are 100 people. 99 of them have the favorite color green. 1 of them has the favorite color red. Does that mean the logo will be red? What assumptions are implicit here to say yes? (this is where the logic fails) If a singular person controls the color of the logo and that person is not chosen at random then it really doesn't matter how many people have a favorite color green. The logo will be the favorite color of the person that makes the choice. Everyone else is noise.

Coming back to Twitter it would be naive to assume that the choices are being made democratically or uniformly at random. So what does the median employee's opinion matter? We know that higher incomes tend to lean more conservative but this is hard to say here because those studies generally aggregate out all salaries >$100k/yr, which might as well be a random sample. If the trend continues (reasonable assumption, but naive to take as fact) then it is reasonable to assume that managers (who we are assuming make more money than the median employee) are more conservative. But again, we just don't know.

The data you are linking to is actually irrelevant to the conversation at hand (it also has a huge yearly variance, making it even more noisy).

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#308

Post by throwawayacc3 »

seo-speedwagon wrote: post #162

None of this is new information. There is an entire help page about this https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-reach... The only new info I learned was Libs of TicTok apparently got special protections not afforded to regular users

The Four Stages:

1. It's not happening.

2. It's happening, but it's equally applied.

3. It's not equally applied and that's a good thing.

4. We already knew about it. Why is this news?

^---- You are here.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#309

Post by remarkEon »

XorNot wrote: post #277
remarkEon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even HN shadow bans people HN also gives you an option to see this content in your account settings (showdead = yes).

That's different to letting the person it was done too see it.

Fair. It would be trivial to add this functionality, I would assume.

Re: The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists

#310

Post by rhaksw »

anigbrowl wrote: post #102
rhaksw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my blog's domain, which I got for $2/year, what's wrong with that? We should turn up our nose at everyone who bought the cheapest domain? Interesting you bring this up though because tweets mentioning .win domains still get shadow removed, even today with the new owner. This Tweet [1] only appears when directly linked. It does not appear beneath its parent [2] for anyone but me. [1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/st…

That's likely because .win has a terrible reputation due to the number of shitty websites on that TLD. I would personally prefer to spend a few $ more to avoid creating an unnecessary negative impression.

The point is people won't notice this because Twitter doesn't tell you your tweet was hidden.

Does it make sense for Twitter to shadow remove tweets from a whole TLD? The fact that it needs to be done secretly is evidence that most users don't know that using such a TLD will "create a negative impression".

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