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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

#361

Post by Markoff »

rideontime wrote: post #98

Fascinating to see how the comment section is skewed only by the people who are invested enough in this melodrama to have come running to HN to discuss the thread. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out when the rest of the world wakes up.

No offense, but pretty much everyone outside America is already awake long time ago, especially the buggest part of world population living in Asia. Whole America has like 1/5 of Asia population.

I think you should refresh your time zones knowledge.

But yeah, Northamerican leftists are not awake yet.

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

#362

Post by oska »

rideontime wrote: post #270

Twitter's current head of Trust & Safety has admitted that the posted screenshots were "requested"[1] from her. This clearly isn't a balanced report. https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601084794288640000

I think you're misreading that tweet. What she is saying there is that the reporters did not have access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and that they had to get information on the various filters applied to an account via screenshots of the control system provided by the internal Twitter official who was has this access and is also responsible for keeping PII private.

Nevertheless, thank you for linking that tweet. It's an important one for clarification of the process that is being followed, and the care being taken.

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

#363

Post by weberer »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #50
rhaksw wrote: post #35

Wow this post is #208 on HN: https://i.imgur.com/e4lQko4.png It's only an hour old. The post must've been flagged, which I know has a pretty heavy influence on the ranking here. For those flagging, this conversation is worth having. Whether platforms secretly demote people's content is important to them.

How did you even find it? I only found it trying to submit it because I didn't see it. And HN loves posting dirt on tech companies here - understandably so - because a lot of it is highly technical. So this being absent is really suspicious. Like, I'd love to know how they implemented the "Trends Blacklist". In the years older leak I had assumed that it was on the trending terms, but Weiss revealed that it was target…

>How did you even find it?

I saw it in the HN Telegram feed. Stories that get taken down here remain on the feed.

https://t.me/hacker_news_feed

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

#364

Post by rhaksw »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #143
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

Reddit and HN are...not Twitter? Guess which one of the three is regularly used by Taylor Swift. The big difference is that Twitter links are routinely used by journalists and such who will notice and specifically call out Tweets as being deleted. A shadow ban / hellban on Twitter would be much more easily noticed by the media. On the other hand, no one in the media to a rounding error cares about shadow bans on Redd…

Ah right, only Taylor Swift and journalists matter. Nevermind where the next Taylor Swift and journalists come from. The platforms will decide for us!

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

#365

Post by Dracophoenix »

rhaksw wrote: post #228
Zuiii wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8] This is not true. There are cases where comments are silently removed without any public indicator; To the author, it appears as if the comment is posted normally. To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.

There may be some wires crossed here. Reddit does show all removed comments to the people who wrote them as if they're not removed. I built Reveddit to reveal this. You can lookup a random user with this link [1]. There's a 50% chance they have a removed comment in their recent history, and chances are they weren't told that it was removed. > To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever…

This may be tangential to the topic at hand, but thank you for carrying the torch for true transparency on Reddit.

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

#366

Post by harry8 »

sangnoir wrote: post #348
harry8 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accou…

"Kid gloves" seems like a reasonable inference to me. There are sufficiently prominent cases where scaling doesn't matter a damn, eg the decision to suspend or not the president. Taibbi claimed there was a lot of back-channel manual intervention going on from both repubs and dems for manual intervention. One would imagine there was a lot also not from partisan politics. Back channel who you know seems like one of the way things were done. Did it get out of hand? Should it be done at all. Plenty to discuss there.

The other inference that occurred to me is that multiple twitter departments pulled these levers and didn't always have one view on it - hence the "don't flippin' touch this" sign with the message on who to talk to. That's not there as an endrun around automation.

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

#367

Post by hyperdunc »

telaelit wrote: post #313
hyperdunc wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The average person would not agree a far right systemic bias is now growing. What you're seeing is a correction towards the center.

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

#368

Post by rhaksw »

bavell wrote: post #288
tptacek wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter what "most people" would consider, because Twitter provided their definition of the term at the time. People disagree about all sorts of terms, and that's totally fair, but what Weiss is doing is retconning her own personal definition of the term on Twitter's policy statements, which were unambiguous. She is, in turn, being unambiguously dishonest. It's interesting how selective people are about the…

Right, Twitter provided their own definition which delicately tiptoes around the unsavory issue and Weiss expanded the definition to suit her own self-interests. How does that make what "most people" would consider not matter? Seems like a non-sequitur to me but maybe I'm not understanding your point.

Agreed, it's rare for any service to outright say "we shadow ban" as done here [1] for example.

And, most services still use a form of shadow moderation [2]. So it's perfectly fine to discuss here. Attempts to shut down conversation are just that.

[1] https://getstream.io/blog/feature-announcement-shadow-ban/

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

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

#369

Post by veec_cas_tant »

user3939382 wrote: post #242
rswail wrote: post #120

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? Irrespective of whether or not you agree with individual decisions, the fact that such systems exist should not be a surprise. These companies operate within legal frameworks across multiple jurisdictions that have endless variations of restrict…

They surreptitiously colluded with congressmen and FBI spooks to suppress political speech before an election. I think you’re missing the bigger story here.

The current releases haven't established anything even close to that. Can you cite which tweet(s) you are referring to? Honestly, if they do have evidence of something in that ballpark, these two have done a terrible job exposing it.

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

#370

Post by rhaksw »

adamwk wrote: post #197
bavell wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links. Colloquially, I think many information suppression tactics…

I agree that colloquially it's definition can be looser depending on context, but it's in bad faith that Weiss[0] quotes Twitter's then Head of Policy and Trust as saying Twitter doesn't shadow ban people when in the very blog post[1] she's quoting they clearly define shadow banning as, "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poste…

> "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."

This happened to my tweet here [1]. It doesn't show up under the parent tweet [2]. It appears to be some sort of domain-based shadow filtering.

It's probably because of the cheap .win domain I bought for $2. Why would Twitter censor that link? One could speculate it was because patriots.win moved there from r/The_Donald. But they "don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology." right?

For the record, I built Reveddit because I perceived that r/The_Donald made heavier use of shadow moderation than the rest of Reddit. However I later learned that its use is common across Reddit and other sites.

Shadow moderation is nobody's friend, except to serve as a reminder of that fact. It was purportedly built to deal with bots, but bots know how to check the visibility of their content. It hurts genuine individuals the most.

[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136

[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553

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