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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

#311

Post by Khaine »

threeseed wrote: post #109
adnzzzzZ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136 , while Elon is explicitly…

Problem is that there is a reason shadow bans exist. It prevents nefarious actors from easily probing the limits of their content moderation processes. It really is funny how Musk is just taking Twitter back to the start.

I think the issue is not that this feature exists, but that it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right, while at the same time twitter denied this.

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

#312

Post by ergocoder »

throwawayacc3 wrote: post #308
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.

5. TruthSocial does it too

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

#313

Post by telaelit »

hyperdunc wrote: post #287
telaelit wrote: post #226

These “Twitter Files” have been so disappointing. I was really expecting to see some crazy stuff, but all I’m seeing is a company that was moderating their content. Even the incident that Weiss points out of someone being doxxed and Twitter doing nothing about it happened under Elon’s rule, and was probably not moderated because of the chaos that Elon created. Even the people that were “shadow banned” makes sense, I’…

In other words, Twitter was moderating user content according to a systemic far-left political bias at the company. But since your bias matches, you don't think it's a big deal.

If the political bias you’re seeing is “far-left” then you’re very far to the right. Advertisers don’t want to advertise on a website that is being used to direct hate and violence towards the LGBTQ+ community, advertisers are the main source of revenue for Twitter, thus content directing hate and violence towards the LGBTQ+ community are moderated. Similar arguments could be made for other ways in which Twitter was moderating their content. Those are decisions to boost revenue and to make Twitter a safer place for people to hang out, I don’t see how those are “far left” biased decisions. If employees were pushing a “far left” agenda I’d expect to see every conservative shadow banned, instead conservatives were protected (ex. Libs of TikTok not being kicked off). Last year Twitter even admitted to boosting conservative content in order to try to appease conservatives claiming a bias [0]. Im sorry but I just don’t see anything that proves there was a “systemic far left political bias” at Twitter. If anything I’m seeing a far-right systemic bias growing at Twitter with Elon at the helm.

[0] - https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

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

#314

Post by iudqnolq »

mandmandam wrote: post #283
pcwalton wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter should have been more aggressive with taking down COVID misinformation, not less. I saw "#hydroxychloroquine" trend far too often, with posts advocating using it as a substitute for vaccines at the top of the results upon clicking it.

Are you call Dr. Bhattacharya's warning of the harmful effects on children of lockdowns in schools "COVID misinformation"? How so? ... Did Dr. Bhattacharya promote hydroxychloroquine? I don't think he did. Even searching for those terms, I'm not getting anything.

I don't like the term misinformation. I don't think Twitter should have restricted his tweets. However, it's important to remember Bhattacharya was wrong.

In the op-ed posted above he guessed that the predicted death toll of 2-4 million people was off by multiple orders of magnitude. He said that dramatic interventions like lockdowns would be justified to prevent that kind of death toll, but that COVID was nowhere near that deadly.

So far COVID has killed about a million Americans. So by the logic he lays out in that op-ed his policy proposals were wrong.

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

#315

Post by HappyTypist »

veec_cas_tant wrote: post #79
adnzzzzZ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136 , while Elon is explicitly…

That tweet is referencing this[0] blog post. > We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology. It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior: >What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retwe…

Twitter's visibility filtering wasn't based on "Your" User Behavior. It was based on what their moderation team decided to filter or not filter.

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

#316

Post by ArunRaja »

etchalon wrote: post #111

When Musk announced his new policy towards moderation (speech, not reach), I pointed out it sounded no different in practice than "shadow banning", which was already something that certain segments of people considered censorship. The reaction to this drop, which just describes how any moderation system at scale works/would need to work, is a nice confirmation of that belief. "They have a secret blacklist!!" It's a d…

One important change coming from elon:

Terminal for each user showing their Shadowbanned status. And ability to appeal against it.

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

#317

Post by selwynii »

archagon wrote: post #244
transcriptase wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

What are the political leanings of random Twitter employees...?

A glance at political contributions of Twitter employees at 99.7% to one party gives you a very strong prior in what the political leaning of random Twitter employees to be.

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

#318

Post by Eleison23 »

seo-speedwagon wrote: post #300
rhaksw wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. I bet you would not like for your comment here to be secretly removed. In fact, many users are shocked to discover when this happens, as I share here [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#319

Post by quadrifoliate »

user3939382 wrote: post #280
awacs wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's say they did, it's a private company, 1st Amendment doesn't apply in the manner you seem to think. In fact it's the opposite, they as an entity / company have 1st Amendment rights to do as they please with content on their platform. That being said, yes they suppressed propaganda and disinformation that could lead to bodily harm (as on J6). People like Fox News hosts pushing disinformation that could lead t…

What the congressmen did was illegal on their part. What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election which the fake left seemed to be so upset about. The tweets weren’t propaganda, some of them were about Joe Biden being involved in illegal deals with eg China. The source information for this, his sons laptop, has been verified as authentic by for example the Washington Pos…

> What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election…

Huh? Twitter does not administer US elections last I checked. I am sure people could read this hugely consequential information you're claiming on Reddit, 4chan, OANN, AM radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, or various other outlets that right-leaning voters typically seem to use. In fact, I seem to recall all of those running several stories about it at the time.

Or are you claiming that Twitter is the sole source of media that the entire United States consumes?

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

#320

Post by fzeroracer »

remarkEon wrote: post #304
XorNot wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Have you ever moderated anything? A discord server? A forum? IRC channel? Literally anything at all?

You didn't actually address the OPs claims and the reason why shadowbanning exists. Sometimes you get people that are literal stalkers, harassers. People that chase out other individuals. The problem is when you ban them you give them a clear signal that they are unable to post. So what do they do? They create a new account. Then they repeat the process.

Not informing them that they violated the rules is the entire point. The broader population already knows that these behaviors are bad. The problem is dealing with specific users that refuse to give up and refuse to go away. To them their account has zero value; a ban means nothing to them. Their value is based on dealing damage to other users of your community.

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