4 ms·

From the article: “I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account behavior not the content of Tweets.” It sounds like it's an automated system attemptin

From the article: “I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account behavior not the content of Tweets.” It sounds like it's an automated system attempting to de-emphasize certain uses of the platform, not someone standing there going "Okay, Republican? Shadowbanned. Next? Republican? Shadowbanned. Next?" i.e. if you don't want to be shadowbanned, maybe stop acting poorly.

mkempe 8y ago
That is a lie for public consumption. It is not just based on some general behaviour. The accounts of multiple notorious Republican congressmen are being shadow-banned. They could openly whitelist the accounts of all members of Congress if they wanted to remove any appearance of politically-motivated, selective animus. I'm looking for the non-public moral reasoning. [added] For instance, I could tentatively understand an argument that anyone who promotes the violent overthrow of the Republic should be banned, or at the least not be promoted, within the platform. (That particular angle, by the way, is not how Twitter operates.) Haha. Am I being downvoted by people who really really want me to swallow PR, or by sundry communists?
- sincerely 8y ago
  With all due respect, I don't see how "the accounts of some republican congressmen are being shadowbanned" necessarily implies "shadowbanning isn't based on general account behavior". Could you explain?
  - mkempe 8y ago
    Ok, what do the shadow-banned Republican representatives Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Devin Nunes have in common?
    - sincerely 8y ago
      Beats me, but I don't have access to all the account behavior data Twitter does, nor do I know what metrics they use to determine whether to shadowban an account. It certainly doesn't seem to be based on political affiliation since many Republican political accounts haven't been shadowbanned.
      - mkempe 8y ago
        If you are interested in the truth, how many of their Democrat colleagues have been shadow banned? Answer: none. But according to you it "certainly doesn't seem to be based on political affiliation".
ZainRiz 8y ago
Most likely this is an AI/ML bases system that is doing Natural Language Processing to determine if an account is exhibiting "bad behavior" That means first they identified many badly behaving accounts, trained their ML model to auto-detect other accounts behaving badly, and then banned them. Of course, these ML models are famously hard to decipher. The implication? Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original set of accounts they used to train their model (most likely it was accounts that had been manually banned in the past, these would have been bans which went unnoticed by the media) but they can't say "our model auto-bans accounts which do X, Y, and Z" because the logic used by the ML models is too obscure for any person to understand.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original set of accounts they used to train their model The first step to blocking trolls is to not help them understand how they got identified. Seriously, ask Google what algorithm they use to block scammers. They aren’t going to tell you, because then the scammers will just use it to screw with search results even more.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    So, a group of notorious Republican congressmen are trolls and scammers? that's how you believe Twitter makes decisions?

mkempe 8y ago

That is a lie for public consumption. It is not just based on some general behaviour. The accounts of multiple notorious Republican congressmen are being shadow-banned. They could openly whitelist the accounts of all members of Congress if they wanted to remove any appearance of politically-motivated, selective animus. I'm looking for the non-public moral reasoning. [added] For instance, I could tentatively understand an argument that anyone who promotes the violent overthrow of the Republic should be banned, or at the least not be promoted, within the platform. (That particular angle, by the way, is not how Twitter operates.) Haha. Am I being downvoted by people who really really want me to swallow PR, or by sundry communists?

sincerely 8y ago
With all due respect, I don't see how "the accounts of some republican congressmen are being shadowbanned" necessarily implies "shadowbanning isn't based on general account behavior". Could you explain?
- mkempe 8y ago
  Ok, what do the shadow-banned Republican representatives Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Devin Nunes have in common?
  - sincerely 8y ago
    Beats me, but I don't have access to all the account behavior data Twitter does, nor do I know what metrics they use to determine whether to shadowban an account. It certainly doesn't seem to be based on political affiliation since many Republican political accounts haven't been shadowbanned.
    - mkempe 8y ago
      If you are interested in the truth, how many of their Democrat colleagues have been shadow banned? Answer: none. But according to you it "certainly doesn't seem to be based on political affiliation".

ZainRiz 8y ago

Most likely this is an AI/ML bases system that is doing Natural Language Processing to determine if an account is exhibiting "bad behavior" That means first they identified many badly behaving accounts, trained their ML model to auto-detect other accounts behaving badly, and then banned them. Of course, these ML models are famously hard to decipher. The implication? Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original set of accounts they used to train their model (most likely it was accounts that had been manually banned in the past, these would have been bans which went unnoticed by the media) but they can't say "our model auto-bans accounts which do X, Y, and Z" because the logic used by the ML models is too obscure for any person to understand.

mcphage 8y ago
> Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original set of accounts they used to train their model The first step to blocking trolls is to not help them understand how they got identified. Seriously, ask Google what algorithm they use to block scammers. They aren’t going to tell you, because then the scammers will just use it to screw with search results even more.
- mkempe 8y ago
  So, a group of notorious Republican congressmen are trolls and scammers? that's how you believe Twitter makes decisions?