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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

#341

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #296
epakai wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ban evasion was a thing long before shadow bans. I've seen persistent users disrupt IRC channels for years, maybe decades. You can't reason with or befriend somebody who holds a grudge that long. Moderators will just have to deal with the problem repeatedly. Shadow bans at least minimize recurrence by taking away the immediate feedback.

IRC generally has no barriers to account registration while Twitter generally requires a phone number. In the former bans are meaningless, in the latter they pose in an insurmountable hurdle to all but organized and funded campaigns. The real problem with shadowbans is "us" - humans. Shadowbans are a great tool for helping to minimize the impact of things like literal spammers and scammers, but it's also a tool that'…

[deleted]

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

#342

Post by vxNsr »

tptacek wrote: post #260
mandmandam wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the one. Are you implying that he's not esteemed? He is. He was right about lockdowns on school children having huge potential for harm. And it was very, very wrong to censor such posts. And again, this was far from an isolated incident. Millions of posts were removed, tens of millions were shadowbanned, delisted, deranked, hidded, supressed, etc. Views questioning natural origin, official policy, vaccina…

Quoted post unavailable.

Why are you being so condescending?

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

#343

Post by anigbrowl »

rhaksw wrote: post #310
anigbrowl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't think it 'needs' to be done secretly so much as big companies cannot be bothered to get into fights over every moderation, and find i more economical to avoid legal liability by not saying anything at all. They don't bind themselves with any promises to do so in their user agreement (which is naturally tilted fully in their favor, since their most avid users are not their customers, as such), and a calculated indifference means less overhead than clear communication. Is that infuriating to some people? Sure, but it's how a lot of businesses operate because it's in their economic interest.

Again, you're not a customer. The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.

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

#344

Post by etchalon »

ArunRaja wrote: post #316
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.

They will 100% eventually, if not soon after, have a special status, that isn't visible to the end user, and isn't appealable, because moderation at scale requires it.

It'll be called something different, or framed in some different way of course.

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

#345

Post by wa_throwaway »

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,…

WhatsApp has a similar internal dashboard for moderation/managing abuse. WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, so it's entirely based on visible user-actions. I'm sure Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Pornhub end others that have any moderation tools are in the same boat. There is no smoking gun here, despite the breathlessness from some quarters (including Musk himself[1]). That "Show DMs" link did send chills down my spine though, sometimes I forget Twitter DMs are not E2E encrypted.

This has a lot in common with Mudge's whistle-blowing case: there is nothing tangible to those familiar with the arts, but it appears to be (or ends up being) red meat "Aha!" gotcha material for those who have never worked in similar environments.

1. Which begs the question: does he really think Twitter's mod tools are unusual, or is he feigning ignorance for some reason known to him?

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

#346

Post by hundredeyed »

theonething wrote: post #177
jacobsenscott wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

So I see the term fascist being thrown around against conservatives frequently on sites like Reddit and I just chalk it up to people on sites like that not really knowing what the term means. HN to me is different. I fully expect people to understand and mean what they say here. So I'd like to know from a fellow HNer what exactly do you mean by calling "these" people fascists and who exactly are these fascists? Do yo…

It's a strange hyperbole isn't it. Same as when people are accused of being "hateful" and "spreading hate" just for voicing a dissenting opinion on some controversial topics, without any hate involved at all.

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

#347

Post by vxNsr »

belltaco wrote: post #220
bavell wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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&...

[flagged]

The vast majority of mass killings are not politically motivated and are in fact gang related. The vast majority of politically related mass killings are committed by people with severe mental illness and the political leanings of the perpetrators are irrelevant. Of the politically related mass killings done by people of sound mind, the distribution is fairly even politically speaking.

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

#348

Post by sangnoir »

harry8 wrote: post #256
tedunangst wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaning no matter how egregiously this account violates the content policy, do not suspend until first consulting with higher ups.

Yes and also meaning (and extremely likely in this case to be the reason - rightly or wrongly) "do not lift these restrictions until first contacting this other group."? Not my first thought when reading the words "no action whitelist" Yours?

At Twitter's volumes, lifting of restrictions manually doesn't scale. Speaking as an outsider: how I would design it would have the lifting of restrictions being automated and set up at the time restrictions are applied (set on a timer or deletion of an offending tweet). Lifting of restrictions manually would be far less frequent than applying them.

With that in mind, I get the distinct impression that the LoTT account was being treated with kid gloves/white gloves.

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

#349

Post by rhaksw »

wa_throwaway wrote: post #345
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,…

WhatsApp has a similar internal dashboard for moderation/managing abuse. WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, so it's entirely based on visible user-actions. I'm sure Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Pornhub end others that have any moderation tools are in the same boat. There is no smoking gun here, despite the breathlessness from some quarters (including Musk himself[1]). That "Show DMs" link did send chills down my spine…

> I'm sure Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Pornhub

They do, I list some here [1]

> There is no smoking gun here

Secretive moderation being common doesn't make it normal or right. It's certainly not widely known. For example, I was on a podcast from Aug. 24 this year talking about shadow moderation [2], and the host says around 27:50 that Twitter is not doing this, only excepting "the algorithm". His point, I believe, was that humans were not manipulating content, and I agreed that I was unaware if that was happening.

Plus, if the use of such secretive tooling were widely known, there would be no need to keep them secret.

The claim has always been that secretive moderation is used to deal with spam. Yet, spammers are the most likely to check the visibility of their content. So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414

[2] https://www.wholewhale.com/podcast/what-is-shadow-moderation...

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

#350

Post by oska »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #239
somenameforme wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are using phrases like "blacklisting doctors" and "censorship" while discussing (essentially) a message board that is used to sell advertisements. I don't think that's a reasonable position. Twitter is a private company that wants to sell advertisements by enabling people to have happy conversations. Fundamentally, they are going to optimize for that, and not whatever high-minded ideals of censorship that we hold…

> Twitter is a private company that wants to sell advertisements by enabling people to have happy conversations.

No, Twitter's mission statement is "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" [1]

Nothing in there about 'happy conversations' and, while selling advertising has been and may continue to be a means to fund this mission, it is not part of their mission. Means are not ends. Companies must run at a profit to survive but they must also work towards and for the mission they serve and the reason they were formed. The Twitter Files have shown that they were failing at this mission (especially the 'without barriers' part), either because they lost focus or were corrupted, or both.

[1] https://mission-statement.com/twitter/

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