4 ms·

Twitter caught auto-deleting retweets?

42 points by MR4D 10y ago

Spoom 10y ago
I'm expecting this to be a Hanlon's razor type deal. Anyone have an idea what might be causing this from a technical perspective?
- pottersbasilisk 10y ago
  Twitter said they wanted to combat abuse. Im thinking occams razor makes more sense here.
- xfax 10y ago
  Probably a combination of bot behavior, lag ("eventual consistency") and deliberate probabilistic approach to user-facing analytics.
raverbashing 10y ago
Or maybe twitter is actively pruning bots and their activity (and they do RT with the purpose of adding a facade of legitimacy) instead of the claimed "persecution"
- MR4D 10y ago
  I'd like to agree with you, but why kill the retweets, and not disable the accounts, too? (I've seen this on my own twitter account, and the retweeting accounts are seemingly never disabled.)
  - dqv 10y ago
    If the spammer gets disabled, it's a clear indicator that they should create a new account or use some other means of circumvention. This appears to be the "shadow ban" method.
williamtrask 10y ago
I'll put my money on someone hacking Twitter before I'd put it on the platform itself.
m52go 10y ago
Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and Trump commentator, noticed this happening a while ago too. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and... I follow him and never see his tweets despite spending a lot of time on TweetDeck throughout the day. When I open the Twitter app, his tweets are never shown on my 'In case you missed it' section. His tweets typically get high engagement, definitely higher than other tweets Twitter recommends, so I find it a bit strange.
- mintplant 10y ago
  Is it possible you have him muted?
  - m52go 10y ago
    Good thought, just checked, I don't.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Twitter cares about engagement from people you follow specifically. Maybe the other people you follow hate him.
  - m52go 10y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that. I tend to follow varied media accounts though, so it's tough to tell from my media consumption where I'm likely to stand politically.
mschuster91 10y ago
It's easy to monitor what happens. Use the Twitter API to monitor your notifications in streaming mode, record all RT events, and check periodically which of the tweets (each RT is actually shown as a separate tweet in the API, with its text attribute set to RT @user <snippet>, for backwards compatibility with old clients, while modern clients can see it's a RT from extended attributes) still appear in the RTing user's feeds. Come to me with hard data and we'll talk but right now this looks like Twitter is just tighting the screws on botnets which many "conservatives" aka alt rights use to bolster their egos.
patrickg_zill 10y ago
There is a list of alt right accounts to be killed, supposedly leaked from a Twitter employee. Some of them have in fact been suspended since the list came out. Just a coincidence? I do not know... If they will suspend accounts, suppress auto-complete on certain hashtags, why wouldn't they mess with other things too?
- aaronchall 10y ago
  This is quite an allegation. Please provide a link to evidence that this happened. Thanks!
  - patrickg_zill 10y ago
    The behavior that I saw, was a hashtag auto-complete working, then, after it became more popular, it would not complete. In some cases a wrongly spelled hashtag would auto-complete and the original would not, even if you were to spell everything but the very last character. That's the behavior. The motivation or code behind that behavior, I can speculate about but cannot prove. Twitter charges for the custom icons that show up, e.g. the BLM three brown circles. An ad agency used by the RNC (EDIT: actually the Trump campaign) had offered to spend $5 million for a custom icon for a hashtag they wanted to use. @jack personally scotched it, even though the vetting process had already been gone through and the funds from the agency allocated. That is circumstantial evidence that gives a possible motive. https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff#.6d05tfm7w https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c...
  - MR4D 10y ago
    I don't know of anything about a leaked list, but a quick google came up with this about shutting alt-right accounts: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-suspends-alt-right-accounts/93943194/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-s... It's like twitter is the modern version of an open mail relay with a character limit and lots of people shouting. Hard for me to believe they can solve many of their problems without changing their service considerably.
JBReefer 10y ago
This, plus the safety council and the pruning of trending topics is definitely a pattern. It's also probably counter productive - this lets activists like Milo campaign on being oppressed for their views, which widens their public appeal enormously. It also adds to the perception of SV as behind-the-scenes manipulative, even if that's not true. Finally, it heightens the idea that the modern Left can't take criticism and is quietly authoritarian, which is exactly the bogeyman these commentators want. If it were just this, I wouldn't believe it, but this is post #1000 about Twitter deprioritizing conservatives. I don't get why they do it, but then again, I don't get a lot about Twitter management. These people, and definitely Milo, would likely fade into obscurity if left alone.
fencepost 10y ago
Frankly, I'd attribute this to a combination of "server farm" issues where lower-importance things like retweet counts may be pulling from slightly stale data and to actively nuking the apparently pretty massive "egg" bot networks that seem to be a problem on Twitter these days.
- giarc 10y ago
  I think you could be right. I remember reading somewhere about the difference between twitter and Facebook. The Facebook newsfeed doesn't need to be in chronological order since they are trying to figure out what is important to you. Twitter has recently changed to do something similar. Therefore it's plausible that something funky is going on that has nothing to do with Twitter censoring particular users. Also, why allow Dowd to only have a few but then let Alex Jones have nearly 600K. I'm not saying the two are the same, but seems like rules would be unevenly applied if the truth was twitter was censoring.
parenthephobia 10y ago
Given the articles on the sidebar, I am inclined to require independent corroboration of these claims. If Twitter is taking the time to censor tweets critical of the government, then they're doing a bad job. Certainly, if I was Twitter and wanted to silence Dowd without people noticing that I was doing it, I'd just shadowban him. > Either eleven people decided to un-retweet Dowd within five minutes of each other, or Twitter decided to censor a tweet critical of the government by limiting it’s visibility. Or, Twitter, being a very large and complex distributed system, sometimes has to show an approximation of things like re-tweet and follower counts. Or, Twitter, wanting to make it harder for spammers to game their systems, deliberately shows users delayed or only kinda accurate stats. Or a mixture of 1, 3, and 4.
- mintplant 10y ago
  > Mass Effect: Andromeda – Sucky Animations, Bigoted Designer And Fugly Females Lead To Canceled Pre-Orders > WHITE EVIL: New ‘Mass Effect’ Excludes White Character Creation In Ongoing SJW Assault On A Race > Emotional Trey Gowdy Warns Anyone Obstructing Pedo Investigations To Be Disemboweled By The Sword Of Justice Uh, yeah, I don't think this source belongs on Hacker News.
  - MR4D 10y ago
    Would you prefer dilbert? http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and... Also, note that the guy referred to in the article is a reputable former Blackrock fund manager. You can check out his twitter feed as well if you don't like this source. https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145 https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Perhaps conservatives attract more spambot followers. (Or as many as anyone else.) If you believe the stuff about the Kremlin, that would make sense.
campuscodi 10y ago
I've noticed Twitter auto-unfollowed many of my friends. Happened on three different occasions.
jackfrodo 10y ago
What a garbage website. This author also wrote >Bioware has been invaded by Social Justice Warriors; millennial feminists who believe the white-male dominated “patriarchy” is the reason opinionated purple-haired land whales aren’t landing jobs. Everyone knows it's bots that mainly follow these people anyway.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Who's everyone? It's critical to remember that outside of the cities, the US is a fairly conservative country, and they use Twitter too.
bassman9000 10y ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6IjZtbyJ9 https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9y...

42 points by MR4D 10y ago

Spoom 10y ago

I'm expecting this to be a Hanlon's razor type deal. Anyone have an idea what might be causing this from a technical perspective?

pottersbasilisk 10y ago
Twitter said they wanted to combat abuse. Im thinking occams razor makes more sense here.
xfax 10y ago
Probably a combination of bot behavior, lag ("eventual consistency") and deliberate probabilistic approach to user-facing analytics.

raverbashing 10y ago

Or maybe twitter is actively pruning bots and their activity (and they do RT with the purpose of adding a facade of legitimacy) instead of the claimed "persecution"

MR4D 10y ago
I'd like to agree with you, but why kill the retweets, and not disable the accounts, too? (I've seen this on my own twitter account, and the retweeting accounts are seemingly never disabled.)
- dqv 10y ago
  If the spammer gets disabled, it's a clear indicator that they should create a new account or use some other means of circumvention. This appears to be the "shadow ban" method.

williamtrask 10y ago

I'll put my money on someone hacking Twitter before I'd put it on the platform itself.

m52go 10y ago

Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and Trump commentator, noticed this happening a while ago too. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and... I follow him and never see his tweets despite spending a lot of time on TweetDeck throughout the day. When I open the Twitter app, his tweets are never shown on my 'In case you missed it' section. His tweets typically get high engagement, definitely higher than other tweets Twitter recommends, so I find it a bit strange.

mintplant 10y ago
Is it possible you have him muted?
- m52go 10y ago
  Good thought, just checked, I don't.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Twitter cares about engagement from people you follow specifically. Maybe the other people you follow hate him.
- m52go 10y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that. I tend to follow varied media accounts though, so it's tough to tell from my media consumption where I'm likely to stand politically.

mschuster91 10y ago

It's easy to monitor what happens. Use the Twitter API to monitor your notifications in streaming mode, record all RT events, and check periodically which of the tweets (each RT is actually shown as a separate tweet in the API, with its text attribute set to RT @user <snippet>, for backwards compatibility with old clients, while modern clients can see it's a RT from extended attributes) still appear in the RTing user's feeds. Come to me with hard data and we'll talk but right now this looks like Twitter is just tighting the screws on botnets which many "conservatives" aka alt rights use to bolster their egos.

patrickg_zill 10y ago

There is a list of alt right accounts to be killed, supposedly leaked from a Twitter employee. Some of them have in fact been suspended since the list came out. Just a coincidence? I do not know... If they will suspend accounts, suppress auto-complete on certain hashtags, why wouldn't they mess with other things too?

aaronchall 10y ago
This is quite an allegation. Please provide a link to evidence that this happened. Thanks!
- patrickg_zill 10y ago
  The behavior that I saw, was a hashtag auto-complete working, then, after it became more popular, it would not complete. In some cases a wrongly spelled hashtag would auto-complete and the original would not, even if you were to spell everything but the very last character. That's the behavior. The motivation or code behind that behavior, I can speculate about but cannot prove. Twitter charges for the custom icons that show up, e.g. the BLM three brown circles. An ad agency used by the RNC (EDIT: actually the Trump campaign) had offered to spend $5 million for a custom icon for a hashtag they wanted to use. @jack personally scotched it, even though the vetting process had already been gone through and the funds from the agency allocated. That is circumstantial evidence that gives a possible motive. https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff#.6d05tfm7w https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c...
- MR4D 10y ago
  I don't know of anything about a leaked list, but a quick google came up with this about shutting alt-right accounts: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-suspends-alt-right-accounts/93943194/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-s... It's like twitter is the modern version of an open mail relay with a character limit and lots of people shouting. Hard for me to believe they can solve many of their problems without changing their service considerably.

JBReefer 10y ago

This, plus the safety council and the pruning of trending topics is definitely a pattern. It's also probably counter productive - this lets activists like Milo campaign on being oppressed for their views, which widens their public appeal enormously. It also adds to the perception of SV as behind-the-scenes manipulative, even if that's not true. Finally, it heightens the idea that the modern Left can't take criticism and is quietly authoritarian, which is exactly the bogeyman these commentators want. If it were just this, I wouldn't believe it, but this is post #1000 about Twitter deprioritizing conservatives. I don't get why they do it, but then again, I don't get a lot about Twitter management. These people, and definitely Milo, would likely fade into obscurity if left alone.

fencepost 10y ago

Frankly, I'd attribute this to a combination of "server farm" issues where lower-importance things like retweet counts may be pulling from slightly stale data and to actively nuking the apparently pretty massive "egg" bot networks that seem to be a problem on Twitter these days.

giarc 10y ago
I think you could be right. I remember reading somewhere about the difference between twitter and Facebook. The Facebook newsfeed doesn't need to be in chronological order since they are trying to figure out what is important to you. Twitter has recently changed to do something similar. Therefore it's plausible that something funky is going on that has nothing to do with Twitter censoring particular users. Also, why allow Dowd to only have a few but then let Alex Jones have nearly 600K. I'm not saying the two are the same, but seems like rules would be unevenly applied if the truth was twitter was censoring.

parenthephobia 10y ago

Given the articles on the sidebar, I am inclined to require independent corroboration of these claims. If Twitter is taking the time to censor tweets critical of the government, then they're doing a bad job. Certainly, if I was Twitter and wanted to silence Dowd without people noticing that I was doing it, I'd just shadowban him. > Either eleven people decided to un-retweet Dowd within five minutes of each other, or Twitter decided to censor a tweet critical of the government by limiting it’s visibility. Or, Twitter, being a very large and complex distributed system, sometimes has to show an approximation of things like re-tweet and follower counts. Or, Twitter, wanting to make it harder for spammers to game their systems, deliberately shows users delayed or only kinda accurate stats. Or a mixture of 1, 3, and 4.

mintplant 10y ago
> Mass Effect: Andromeda – Sucky Animations, Bigoted Designer And Fugly Females Lead To Canceled Pre-Orders > WHITE EVIL: New ‘Mass Effect’ Excludes White Character Creation In Ongoing SJW Assault On A Race > Emotional Trey Gowdy Warns Anyone Obstructing Pedo Investigations To Be Disemboweled By The Sword Of Justice Uh, yeah, I don't think this source belongs on Hacker News.
- MR4D 10y ago
  Would you prefer dilbert? http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and... Also, note that the guy referred to in the article is a reputable former Blackrock fund manager. You can check out his twitter feed as well if you don't like this source. https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145 https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Perhaps conservatives attract more spambot followers. (Or as many as anyone else.) If you believe the stuff about the Kremlin, that would make sense.

campuscodi 10y ago

I've noticed Twitter auto-unfollowed many of my friends. Happened on three different occasions.

jackfrodo 10y ago

What a garbage website. This author also wrote >Bioware has been invaded by Social Justice Warriors; millennial feminists who believe the white-male dominated “patriarchy” is the reason opinionated purple-haired land whales aren’t landing jobs. Everyone knows it's bots that mainly follow these people anyway.

JBReefer 10y ago
Who's everyone? It's critical to remember that outside of the cities, the US is a fairly conservative country, and they use Twitter too.

bassman9000 10y ago

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6IjZtbyJ9 https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9y...