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A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#321

This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#322

I'm in Thailand and just get this message: We've discontinued servicing users from your location and are thereby preventing access to any of the websites owned and operated by ZAM Network, LLC DBA Fanbyte (the owner of Fanbyte.com): This decision is ultimately one we were forced to make due to the number of visitors from your region when compared to the operational costs necessary to continue providing access there.…

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#323
post #321

This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#324

It seems like the problem with many of these tech companies (and many modern companies in general) is that they've scaled faster than they have the ability to operate properly. "How can we possibly moderate properly without AI?" is really just another way of saying "We don't want to pay the money it's going to cost to moderate effectively and we're going to cross our fingers that we can solve problems caused by techn…

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

They need to crowdsource the moderation job. Something like voting and flagging but cleverer.

Of course this might deprive them of the ability to censor at will.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#325
Sucks when there are false positives but I am glad there are efforts to reduce the likelihood a human has to watch and flag a video that could be “revenge porn”. Plenty of threads on the lasting affects of exposure to this type of content on moderators. (for example here’s a HN thread on a Facebook content moderator’s resignation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819883)

Seems like additional signals should play into a confidence score though: how new is your account, what content is your account viewing, etc.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#326

It seems like the problem with many of these tech companies (and many modern companies in general) is that they've scaled faster than they have the ability to operate properly. "How can we possibly moderate properly without AI?" is really just another way of saying "We don't want to pay the money it's going to cost to moderate effectively and we're going to cross our fingers that we can solve problems caused by techn…

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

There are other areas of life where the “firehose” is simply against the law because of safety concerns. We might decide at some point that one Facebook was too many and get off this merry-go-round.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#327

Twitter is an abysmal shithole of bad software engineering and bad webshit policy, which seems to be a requirement to be a website that serves public utility. I also so happened to rant about idiot moderation policies just 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32174538 I can write this rant every day. Also, this is the first thing that comes to mind when hearing "AI moderation". What we are seeing here is…

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#328

It seems like the problem with many of these tech companies (and many modern companies in general) is that they've scaled faster than they have the ability to operate properly. "How can we possibly moderate properly without AI?" is really just another way of saying "We don't want to pay the money it's going to cost to moderate effectively and we're going to cross our fingers that we can solve problems caused by techn…

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

Your reply assumes that these businesses must continue to exist at all costs, effective moderation be damned. If it’s true that they cannot afford good moderation, then maybe it’s not a sustainable business model?

I know online content platforms are wildly different than other industries, which is why these problems exist at all. We don’t seem to have good solutions yet. But we wouldn’t have any issue declaring that any other industry that couldn’t afford to do the “quality control” well enough isn’t a sustainable industry.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#329
A. A human _was_ involved and B. His issue was resolved within 24 hours: https://twitter.com/imranzomg/status/1549914737781063680

Like, come on. I agree that the processes and moderation models could be better, especially at the appeals phase, but we don't see the other side of the battle twitter content moderation is fighting.

Even if their doing a stellar job statistics-wise, we probably wouldn't know because PR wouldn't want a blog post about how a twitter hovers on the brink of becoming a cesspool.

I'm less sympathetic when inhumane moderation policies ruin lives as we see a lot of with google properties (YT, gmail), but this instance is pretty far from such a case.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#330
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, most of the moderation on Reddit is done by unpaid humans, not AI. Reddit isn't perfect, of course, but their approach does scale.

Moderators on Reddit are extremely petty and vindictive and I have hypothesized for a long time that this is because they are not paid with money.

Yes

1. If they didn't get something out of it, they wouldn't be doing it.

2. They don't get money out of it.

3. So...

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