8 ms·

Announcing the Twitter Trust and Safety Council

41 points by protomyth 11y ago

exstudent2 11y ago
It's amazing that Twitter seems to think pouring effort and bureaucracy into "gentrifying" its userbase is somehow going to turn around the service. Twitter has a major problem, but it's not cyberbullying or radical activists; it's that the product is super stale and they haven't innovated in years (ever?). Not killing their ecosystem would have returned far more value to Twitter than becoming a platform with a hardcore political bias. Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency.
- theOnliest 11y ago
  > Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency. Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. Twitter's announcement claims they want to provide a voice to: "Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;" That's precisely the definition of Gamergate and Twitter did everything in its power to censor and stop that movement. Including banning users, unverifying users and censoring auto-suggest for Gamergate related topics. Feminist Frequency played a large role in that censorship.
    - lambic 11y ago
      > Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. "Women should be treated as equals" and "harrasment is bad" are opinions on the far end of the political spectrum? I think I just became an extremist.
      - exstudent2 11y ago
        Well, this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views but they are more radical than you suggest. She has every right to think this way, but to claim that she's middle of the road is disingenuous. Here are some samples of fairly aggressive feminist thinking that I don't think the mainstream would go along with: https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/Fkals https://archive.is/Fkals While it's undeniable that she did receive some harassment, she also has labeled anyone who disagrees with her as harassers and misogynists. She's also famous for coining the phrase "Listen and believe" which is in direct opposition to "innocent until proven guilty". So yeah, I'd consider her pretty radical.
        tptacek 11y ago
        The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? Your initial argument about this person is facile. A pretty solid chunk of the "mainstream" throughout the world would also have problems with the "radical politics" of GLAAD. It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. You should cut your losses on this unproductive subthread, which, as you clearly knew when you started it, can't possibly remain on-topic.
        exstudent2 11y ago
        > The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? She's a video game critic. > It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. I'm not familiar with all of the other members. Feminist Frequency stood out because they're an organization I know about.
        tptacek 11y ago
  - cyphar 11y ago
    > Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter. Except of course that she's cried wolf on many occasions (going so far as to /invent/ threats and then pretend that she called the police about it and they advised her to tweet about it) and in general has incredibly extreme views (which IMO don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny, but that could be my bias showing). The point is that a "trust and safety" council should also protect people from lynch mobs created by people like Feminist Frequency, right? So maybe we should get thunderf00t (not going to happen) to be part of this council?
- Shish2k 11y ago
  I find it hilarious / tragic that the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their social problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their product problems; and the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their product problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their social problems.
arprocter 11y ago
And what happens when "more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions" aren't in agreement with each other? This seems like hand-waving; and if it isn't, look what happened when reddit tried to move away from being an anything goes environment
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  I assume some of those organizations and experts are more equal than others.
ascorbic 11y ago
I'm sorry, but a council with more than 40 member organisations sounds a lot like lip service rather than anything substantive. How will this council do anything? The post explains why they need one, and says who they are, but doesn't say what they'll do apart from "tapping into their expertise".
patrickmay 11y ago
I don't see the ACLU or any other organization dedicated to freedom of expression on that council. This doesn't bode well for Twitter's support of free speech.
- seivan 11y ago
  Free speech isn't aligned with their business model and their biggest share holders are not so keen on it either. Not saying I agree with it, just stating that it's on par.
  - barney54 11y ago
    For years, Twitter promoted itself as paragons of free speech even calling itself the "free speech wing of the free speech party." http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wa... It looks like they have turned their backs on that. I don't know how to see it otherwise.
- cyphar 11y ago
  Twitter has shown for quite a while that they don't care for freedom of expression (which they might be legally allowed to do, that doesn't make arbitrary censorship of users a morally acceptable choice).
bishnu 11y ago
Detecting and hiding abusive tweets algorithmically is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. These methods are employed widely by Facebook and Google. It's baffling to me that Twitter doesn't do the same thing, and is willing to burn money on pointless bureaucracy like this. Remember the "Other" inbox in FB? Twitter abuse could have been a footnote on par with that. Instead it's the only thing anyone talks about (deservedly so).
- tptacek 11y ago
  When you say something "algorithmic" is "NOT THAT DIFFICULT" on HN, I feel like you shoulder some obligation to explain some of the algorithmic approaches. You know, if it really is "not that difficult". That sure as shit sounds like a more interesting discussion to have than a semantic debate about free speech.
  - bishnu 11y ago
    A regression model trained from existing spam and abuse report data to twitter would cover ~99% of terrible at-replies on twitter. Look how effectively a hacked-together script that just uses a couple of heuristics like GGAutoBlocker works. [1] Something a little more principled, trained with unfettered access to user data, would effectively kill the problem. IMO. [1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker
    - harryh 11y ago
      Your understanding of what is difficult is wrong because you're looking at it as a detection problem when it's actually a false positive problem. See: http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/ http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/
      - bishnu 11y ago
        That is an overly simplistic problem description. It's trying to identify spam/abuse in a universal way, which is a much harder (and barely coherent) problem, and then delete those tweets which makes the cost of a false positive much higher. What’s far more feasible is to compute the probability a given user would like to see a specific tweet, and then have those below a certain threshold hidden (IE, don’t ping the notification tab for it). This is actually a very well-studied problem, and the massively parallel ML infrastructure it would take exists. Eg, http://www.datanami.com/2014/07/17/inside-sibyl-googles-massively-parallel-machine-learning-platform/ http://www.datanami.com/2014/07/17/inside-sibyl-googles-mass...
TrevorJ 11y ago
It's a worthy goal, I wish the name didn't sound so... I dunno, Orwellian?
J_Darnley 11y ago
> On Twitter, every voice has the power to shape the world. > Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum > ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence Then why are they so eager to remove accounts of people they don't like or who speech they don't like. Weren't they bragging just last week about removing 125000 "terrorist" accounts.
barney54 11y ago
For some perspective of how Twitter has changed over the years, particularly their relationship to free speech, here is Vice's History of Twitter's rules: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rul...

41 points by protomyth 11y ago

It's amazing that Twitter seems to think pouring effort and bureaucracy into "gentrifying" its userbase is somehow going to turn around the service. Twitter has a major problem, but it's not cyberbullying or radical activists; it's that the product is super stale and they haven't innovated in years (ever?). Not killing their ecosystem would have returned far more value to Twitter than becoming a platform with a hardcore political bias. Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency.

theOnliest 11y ago
> Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency. Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. Twitter's announcement claims they want to provide a voice to: "Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;" That's precisely the definition of Gamergate and Twitter did everything in its power to censor and stop that movement. Including banning users, unverifying users and censoring auto-suggest for Gamergate related topics. Feminist Frequency played a large role in that censorship.
  - lambic 11y ago
    > Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. "Women should be treated as equals" and "harrasment is bad" are opinions on the far end of the political spectrum? I think I just became an extremist.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      Well, this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views but they are more radical than you suggest. She has every right to think this way, but to claim that she's middle of the road is disingenuous. Here are some samples of fairly aggressive feminist thinking that I don't think the mainstream would go along with: https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/Fkals https://archive.is/Fkals While it's undeniable that she did receive some harassment, she also has labeled anyone who disagrees with her as harassers and misogynists. She's also famous for coining the phrase "Listen and believe" which is in direct opposition to "innocent until proven guilty". So yeah, I'd consider her pretty radical.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? Your initial argument about this person is facile. A pretty solid chunk of the "mainstream" throughout the world would also have problems with the "radical politics" of GLAAD. It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. You should cut your losses on this unproductive subthread, which, as you clearly knew when you started it, can't possibly remain on-topic.
        exstudent2 11y ago
        > The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? She's a video game critic. > It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. I'm not familiar with all of the other members. Feminist Frequency stood out because they're an organization I know about.
        tptacek 11y ago
- cyphar 11y ago
  > Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter. Except of course that she's cried wolf on many occasions (going so far as to /invent/ threats and then pretend that she called the police about it and they advised her to tweet about it) and in general has incredibly extreme views (which IMO don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny, but that could be my bias showing). The point is that a "trust and safety" council should also protect people from lynch mobs created by people like Feminist Frequency, right? So maybe we should get thunderf00t (not going to happen) to be part of this council?
Shish2k 11y ago
I find it hilarious / tragic that the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their social problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their product problems; and the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their product problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their social problems.

arprocter 11y ago

And what happens when "more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions" aren't in agreement with each other? This seems like hand-waving; and if it isn't, look what happened when reddit tried to move away from being an anything goes environment

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
I assume some of those organizations and experts are more equal than others.

ascorbic 11y ago

I'm sorry, but a council with more than 40 member organisations sounds a lot like lip service rather than anything substantive. How will this council do anything? The post explains why they need one, and says who they are, but doesn't say what they'll do apart from "tapping into their expertise".

patrickmay 11y ago

I don't see the ACLU or any other organization dedicated to freedom of expression on that council. This doesn't bode well for Twitter's support of free speech.

seivan 11y ago
Free speech isn't aligned with their business model and their biggest share holders are not so keen on it either. Not saying I agree with it, just stating that it's on par.
- barney54 11y ago
  For years, Twitter promoted itself as paragons of free speech even calling itself the "free speech wing of the free speech party." http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wa... It looks like they have turned their backs on that. I don't know how to see it otherwise.
cyphar 11y ago
Twitter has shown for quite a while that they don't care for freedom of expression (which they might be legally allowed to do, that doesn't make arbitrary censorship of users a morally acceptable choice).

bishnu 11y ago

Detecting and hiding abusive tweets algorithmically is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. These methods are employed widely by Facebook and Google. It's baffling to me that Twitter doesn't do the same thing, and is willing to burn money on pointless bureaucracy like this. Remember the "Other" inbox in FB? Twitter abuse could have been a footnote on par with that. Instead it's the only thing anyone talks about (deservedly so).

tptacek 11y ago
When you say something "algorithmic" is "NOT THAT DIFFICULT" on HN, I feel like you shoulder some obligation to explain some of the algorithmic approaches. You know, if it really is "not that difficult". That sure as shit sounds like a more interesting discussion to have than a semantic debate about free speech.
- bishnu 11y ago
  A regression model trained from existing spam and abuse report data to twitter would cover ~99% of terrible at-replies on twitter. Look how effectively a hacked-together script that just uses a couple of heuristics like GGAutoBlocker works. [1] Something a little more principled, trained with unfettered access to user data, would effectively kill the problem. IMO. [1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker
  - harryh 11y ago
    Your understanding of what is difficult is wrong because you're looking at it as a detection problem when it's actually a false positive problem. See: http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/ http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/
    - bishnu 11y ago
      That is an overly simplistic problem description. It's trying to identify spam/abuse in a universal way, which is a much harder (and barely coherent) problem, and then delete those tweets which makes the cost of a false positive much higher. What’s far more feasible is to compute the probability a given user would like to see a specific tweet, and then have those below a certain threshold hidden (IE, don’t ping the notification tab for it). This is actually a very well-studied problem, and the massively parallel ML infrastructure it would take exists. Eg, http://www.datanami.com/2014/07/17/inside-sibyl-googles-massively-parallel-machine-learning-platform/ http://www.datanami.com/2014/07/17/inside-sibyl-googles-mass...

TrevorJ 11y ago

It's a worthy goal, I wish the name didn't sound so... I dunno, Orwellian?

J_Darnley 11y ago

> On Twitter, every voice has the power to shape the world. > Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum > ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence Then why are they so eager to remove accounts of people they don't like or who speech they don't like. Weren't they bragging just last week about removing 125000 "terrorist" accounts.

barney54 11y ago

For some perspective of how Twitter has changed over the years, particularly their relationship to free speech, here is Vice's History of Twitter's rules: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rul...