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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

#41

Post by rhaksw »

andrew_ wrote: post #37
rhaksw wrote: post #24

Twitter calls it "visibility filtering" [1] Facebook gives mods a "Hide comment" button [2] TikTok calls it "visible to self" [3] [4] Truth Social does it [5] [6] [7] Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8] Open source tools are built to do it [9] [10] Textbooks advocate "disguise a gag or ban" [11] I call it Shadow Moderation [12]. The system intentionally does not show users…

Its newsworthy because Twitter has been publicly denying that shadowbanning has been in place, and they've denied that preferential treatment based on preferences of internal teams has been in place. Both of those are now being shown to be false statements. Glossing over that fact is a great disservice to the conversation.

That's not the only newsworthy element. Saying that would gloss over the pervasive use of this secretive feature.

The use of this stuff is probably in the companies' terms of use, patents etc. The public is still largely unaware that it happens, as evidenced with Twitter.

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

#42

Post by yucky »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #6
scifibestfi wrote: post #2

"Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending." What. Why?

Well, first of all, “tweets” don’t “trend”. Terms do. So this description feels off, already. Next, I wonder, but don’t care enough to look it up, if this guy is adequately summarized by only mentioning his concern for children? Screw that, I did look him up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya#COVID-19_pa... . He was one of the people behind the “Great” Barrington Declaration and, kn the early months of…

[flagged]

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

#43

Post by JetAlone »

foolinaround wrote: post #38

Discrimination as alleged by conservatives but pooh-poohed as others as merely delusional is now clearly proved. How can tech self-regulate itself, or should there be external agencies who would watch the growing power of tech companies? and who would watch them? Decentralization never seems to take off, so we seem to be left with these existing players like twitter, meta, google ...who are de-facto monopolies....

Right, so now that this thing has been proved we're moving on to the "They did and it's a good thing" phase.

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

#44

Post by rhaksw »

godels_theorem wrote: post #39
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.

Or shadowbanned, like me.

Sadly, many don't even notice full account shadowbans [1] [2].

But account-level shadowbans are sort of known to exist. What's being reported here is harder to detect. That is, the secretive removal of individual pieces of content, or reducing the reach of an account's content.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8z3sd4/i_have_used_red...

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

#45

Post by smoldesu »

foolinaround wrote: post #38

Discrimination as alleged by conservatives but pooh-poohed as others as merely delusional is now clearly proved. How can tech self-regulate itself, or should there be external agencies who would watch the growing power of tech companies? and who would watch them? Decentralization never seems to take off, so we seem to be left with these existing players like twitter, meta, google ...who are de-facto monopolies....

> How can tech self-regulate itself

Would it be a stretch to suggest 'the government'?

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by Jun8 »

There must be a ton of ex (or current) Twitter employees on HN: can one of you verify if the user management tool shown in the photos is an actual thing and provide more information on how it works?

As another sibling comment states, other platforms also do similar things. It's easy how such systems get started and evolve. In fact, given the severe downvoting I see on this and similarly polarizing threads on HN, I think if someone built a browser extension that hides comments by users from a user created list many people HN users would probably use it.

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

#50

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

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 targeting people and tweets.

Or the "Search blacklist". That's basically sabotaging your own search function so that things that are popular/relevant/trending are hidden. That makes no sense for an platform to even do for anything other than censorship of people on purpose.

Or what does "Do Not Amplify" do? Does that mean they do amplify other things, but never want these accounts to be amplified by that process? How was that implemented?

Musk just tweeted: "Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal"

That'll be good to see. Exposing this stuff to the people affected is just...good faith interaction with your users. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be justifiably mad. I wonder what this will do to twitter's stock price...

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