Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#51

Post by tgv » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #22

chiefalchemist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no, but likely mostly no. Keep in mind, the "intelligence" of those AI algorithms comes from datasets of previous behaviors. Given the popularity (?) of the cancel mindset on this particular platform it's reasonable to expect a bias in said data; and in turn the algorithm. Rinse and repeat.

So you actually believe that Twitter's AI is smart enough to detect that this statement is critical of assisted suicide, and that the data it has been trained on was so heavily biased in favor of assisted suicide that it ends up classifying this as "undesirable content"? That sounds incredibly unlikely to me based on what I know about these kinds of algorithms.

Well, if you take facebook's bart-large, and ask it to label the tweet on categories such as conservative, progressive, etc., you get these scores:

    critical 0.887
    conservative 0.387
    radical 0.325
    progressive 0.003

If it can do that, it can generated a "biased" evaluation.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#52

Post by lepton » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

corty wrote: post #31

keiferski wrote: post #12

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aph…

Funnily enough, Das Schloss is often interpreted to be a criticism of the church and organized religion in general. The castle and its workings are seen to be like the clerical teachings, arbitrary, incomprehensible and illogical, but nonetheless highly respected by the plebs.

There was a time when the clergy was Catholic, but might various "scientific experts" be filling that role today?

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#53

Post by 2ion » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

How anybody could treat Twitter as anything but a read-only medium is beyond me. Twitter technically has (even if programmed) editors and what you get to see is what editors did not whitelist, but what they did not blacklist. The latter is only an accommodation of its size. If they could, they would choose a whitelist model.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#54

Post by jkingsbery » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #17

> And even if euthanasia is just that – and Twitter is very proud to toot its horn as the sensitive and sensible, woke platform that clamps down on promotion and encouragement of self-harm, including its ultimate form, suicide – the tweet, even though it opposed it, got banned. This is such an interesting topic, because while euthanasia can be considered a way of suicide, advocating against it can also be considered…

The offending tweet was arguing against all forms of suicide, assisted or otherwise. I'm trying to understand your point charitably, but it escapes me how arguing against suicide could be interpreted as arguing for suicide. I understand that there's a consequentialist argument ("it is going to happen anyway"), but that seems to accept something as inevitable which is not.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#55

Post by hallway_monitor » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

lepton wrote: post #52

corty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, Das Schloss is often interpreted to be a criticism of the church and organized religion in general. The castle and its workings are seen to be like the clerical teachings, arbitrary, incomprehensible and illogical, but nonetheless highly respected by the plebs.

There was a time when the clergy was Catholic, but might various "scientific experts" be filling that role today?

Great point. This can be applied to any type of "revealed wisdom" which is not obvious to the layperson. We are expected to accept their conclusions not question them.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#56

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #12

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aph…

Automatic flagging just means their algorithm is crap. Which is bad, but it's a fixable technical problem in the medium term and the post can be restored in the short term.

If this were deliberate flagging it would mean they were way outside of any reasonable interpretations of their guidelines and users really could no longer post anything and be confident it wouldn't run afoul of those interpretations. This is much harder to fix, and the confusion it wod cause is significantly higher.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#57

Post by _qulr » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

A couple weeks ago Twitter inexplicably suspended @AppsExposed, an account that has repeatedly exposed scams in Apple's App Store and was recently featured in Forbes. The account is still suspended. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/02/porn-ap...

This has nothing to do with euthanasia, but that's the point. It could be anything, or nothing. Twitter doesn't even have to give a reason for suspending accounts. There is no accountability.

"Just don't use Twitter", some say. But Twitter has 300 million users, and you're supposed to "just" ignore that audience. How about "Just don't sell your product in the United States"? Doesn't sound so great, does it. The excuse is always is Twitter is a "private" company (not really, they're publicly traded). But Twitter is literally the size of the United States, it has approximately the same population. Facebook has a larger population than any country on Earth. These aren't just companies, they're almost nations.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#58

Post by vnchr » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #34

Kevin Doran has some serious hang ups with gay people. Surprised he was never banned on that account by Twitter. He's quite the controversial Catholic figure even in Ireland.

That could be the source of algorithmic or human bias that played into the mistaken ban in this case.

Or to theorize intention, maybe someone was looking for an excuse to ban him.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#59

Post by holistio » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

I live in Europe, in a country where black population is statistically insignificant, I only see black people about once every fortnight, and I live in a city of close to 2 million people.

A lot of my acquaintances and friends have practically zero exposure to what caused the BLM movement and during last summer there was a significant number of people posting stuff along the lines of "all lives matter".

To illustrate the absurd effect when "the words seemingly mean a good thing, but their actual meaning is flawed" I posted "All lives matter, arbeit macht frei." on Facebook. I was suspended for 24 hours and my appeal was rejected as well.

Ever since then, I wondered a few times if actual people could have interpreted it as offensive.

And I have since then always arrived to the conclusion that Facebook cannot interpret irony, satire, sarcasm and reflection.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#60

Post by chadash » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

yanderekko wrote: post #30

chadash wrote: post #14

This is a non-story. Someone on twitter wrote: > There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practices, it not an expression of freedom or dignity, but of the failure of a society to accompany people on their "way of the cross" Twitter then flagged it for "promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm". Obviously it is not, but this is a rather complicate…

Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture, especially if its manifestation in practice exhibits biases in the expected fashion. This is actually a major problem with arguments that try to dismiss the need to have ideological diversity in these institutions - cancel culture can arise from genuine good faith moderation if those moderators also happen to just have extremely biased ideologi…

> Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture

Maybe, but this is a bad example of it. Flagging posts that encourage suicide isn't a left vs. right issue... it seems pretty bipartisan to me. The fact that the AI made a mistake on a single example here isn't even indicative of bad AI... this could happen (and did happen in this case on appeal) with human moderators too.