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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

#381

Post by sangnoir »

rhaksw wrote: post #349
wa_throwaway wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beli…

> So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.

From first principles, the moderators would not consider shadow-banned individuals as 'genuine'.

Since you brought up the subject of spammers - whats your take on email spam transparency, and the use of spam folders? should MTAs (like GMail or Exchange server), in the interest of transparency, immediately reject messages categorized as spam rather than accepting and quietly placing them in the spam folder, never to be read by a human? This would absolutely solve the problem where emails from genuine users end up being blackholed in the spam folder.

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

#382

Post by rhaksw »

anigbrowl wrote: post #343
rhaksw wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 then you get into a situation where it can be alleged that a whole political ideology, half the country, has been sidelined by your secretive work.

Short term, that worked for awhile. It is not a long term strategy.

> you're not a customer

Users are part of the product. Lying to them en masse is not a good way to build trust.

> 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.

I guess you've never tried to say something that the majority didn't want you to say, as has happened many times throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to Anthony Comstock to Communism to McCarthy to the Civil Rights Era.

Free expression is held in regard not just when dealing with government, but also when dealing with each other. Shouting over each other isn't considered civil discourse, and neither is censorship wherever it occurs, in private or public places.

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

#383

Post by anigbrowl »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #305
anigbrowl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I don't agree with your premise. When I see a quantitative analysis backing up conservatives' claims that they're unfairly discriminated against, I'd consider it valid.

And yes, I do have a problem with their tone. Conservatives are way overdrawn at the good faith store, having made a years-long habit of hyping things up. This example is from 2005: https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...

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

#384

Post by Epitom3 »

hintymad wrote: post #139

The American philosopher John Rawls had this interesting concept "Veil of Ignorance"[1]. It basically says that only when you don't know who you are will you think clearly about the social justice. That is, pick whichever principles you think the society should stick to, but do so only when you don't know in which position you'll end up being. So, you can think that the justice is killing the damn riches so you can l…

Beautifully said

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

#385

Post by XorNot »

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'…

> IRC generally has no barriers to account registration while Twitter generally requires a phone number. in the latter they pose in an insurmountable hurdle to all but organized and funded campaigns.

Since when is getting a new phone number that receive SMS an insurmountable expensive? There are literally dozens, perhaps hundreds of services selling this. Example [1] https://www.textmagic.com/sms-pricing/ seems to cost me 7c per text received with no account fees, and I only need it to receive a sign up message.

That is far from "organized and funded". People paid $8 to make troll accounts on Twitter when it was possible.

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

#386

Post by Epitom3 »

nkozyra wrote: post #156
forgingahead wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the commenters here as well: "There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed" "This is old news, nothing new here." Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?

> "There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed" Wait, where is this one? I'm sorry, but it doesn't take coordination to know that shadowbans exist. It's spoken openly on Twitter, there are tools to test accounts, etc. It's not surprising because it's open knowledge. No political persuasion necessary to be in the know here.

> Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

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

#387

Post by rhaksw »

sangnoir wrote: post #381
rhaksw wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 beli…

> So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most. From first principles, the moderators would not consider shadow-banned individuals as 'genuine'. Since you brought up the subject of spammers - whats your take on email spam transparency, and the use of spam folders? should MTAs (like GMail or Exchange server), in the interest of transparency, immediately reject messages categorized…

Good question. No, I wouldn't support that. The current system works and there is still transparency. One of the two people in the conversation has a chance to review the content.

It may be that inboxes are different from public or open-ended conversations. What often happens in the moderation of public conversations on social media is that neither person is aware that any removal or demotion occurred. So, even the user(s) whose content was not removed does not have a chance to rescue the content from spam.

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

#388

Post by harry8 »

sangnoir wrote: post #378
harry8 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> There are sufficiently prominent cases where scaling doesn't matter a damn, eg the decision to suspend or not the president Does @LoTT belong to such distinguished company? I don't know, but I know this is not an instance of Twitter "silencing the voices on the right" despite the context of the reporting

Belong? Will they clearly were being treated as a special case.

This is clearly a case of a tipping the scales against a non-liberal voice and is being provided as an example of how these things worked.

Was the treatment deserved, justified, correct or not? This is the question. How arbitrary is it? How could that be abused to lose Hillary an election? (Or whoever). Was it? Most importantly how does this process fare when government officials and politicians make direct threats when making censorship demands?

I find this case a lot less interesting than finding out about the involvement of the fbi etc. I'm far more interested to see if and how Wikileaks stories were de-boosted or not as one controversial example. People claimed that blogging about Assange's court case suddenly got no Twitter referrals. Possible? If so, was it true? If so Why? Did Twitter employees put their thumb on the same to boost (or bury) Bernie?

All these things, i guess we'll see. I strongly doubt Taibi would be in on a cover up unless the CIA had him by the balls or similar, don't know much about Bari. We'll have a lot more confidence whatever comes out. Perhaps some of the people repeating (on twitter) how uninteresting it all is are worried it's too interesting? I'm fascinated to see how much or little was going on, how and why.

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

#389

Post by tasuki »

remarkEon wrote: post #301
dmamills wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why?

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

#390

Post by rhaksw »

anigbrowl wrote: post #74
rhaksw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not trustworthy when a system actions a user's content without telling them. Free speech principles are also a thing. The question is not what is getting demoted, it's how . In this case, it's being done secretly, and Twitter isn't the only one doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414

No. I don't assume I have any rights other than vis-a-vis the government. I've dealt with a lot of corporate bullshit from tech companies, it's an annoyance but I just handle it and don't make a career out of whining about it as some do. I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (espec…

Presumably you eat at restaurants whose food you like and buy hardware whose quality you like. It's the same with social media. You can give attention to systems you support and share information about them. The alternative you propose sounds like cowering to company overlords.

And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?

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