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The analysis in this post is only on two rather small hashtags (a very small percentage of the whole of Twitter). It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", parti
by scribu 7y ago
The analysis in this post is only on two rather small hashtags (a very small percentage of the whole of Twitter).
It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", particularly the part where the author looks at the graph and notices a weird pattern. That's very hard to do automatically.
- molmalo 7y agoThis. And also, the cynic in me tells me that closing millions of accounts does not look good in your quarterly report on user base growth/active users.
- g96alqdm0x 7y agoPerhaps, but I think you would agree that "shareholder value" is a relic of the 80s and a poor metric to optimize for.
- jandrese 7y agoThey also get political blowback when they do this. There is an inevitable flurry of "Twitter is silencing our voices" posts when they shut down botnets. Congressmen start making statements about it. https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dorsey_twitter.jpg https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dor... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/conservative-bias-google-tech-companies.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
- catalogia 7y agoDoes twitter really deserve the trust though? I remember a lot of people I know complaining about getting locked out of their twitter accounts a year or two ago, with twitter demanding a phone number for them "for security". Then a few days ago it comes out that they were using those phone numbers for advertising purposes. Do they really deserve the benefit of the doubt on this?
- brudgers 7y agoTwitter could pay people to do the work.
- Nextgrid 7y ago> That's very hard to do automatically. When you run a worldwide network that has significant potential for abuse and spreading misinformation I would consider it to be your duty to monitor it and guard against these kinds of things. If it costs too much then maybe you shouldn't be in business or should change your business model so that you can afford to clean up the damage your business is doing to society.
- jeegsy 7y agoThe allegation here is that its the government doing it. Do you really think Twitter wants to take on governments?
- birksherty 7y agoShutting down bots that spread misinformation is not against gov. If they do, it will mean they acknowledge that gov is behind all these.
- wutbrodo 7y agoCan you point out what identifies these tweets' content as "misinformation", in a way that's consistently operationalizable among the massive scale of frontline human reviewers that you're expecting? On its face, the content of the tweets is "the Indonesian govt built roads in West Papua", which hardly qualifies as misinformation. The author's analysis that this is more sinister than simply a promotional campaign is, of course, correct: the coopting of the genocide hashtag to promote the government and the use of fake, international-sounding accounts are both skeezy as all hell. But to get to that conclusion, you have a professional journalist doing a level of post-automation analysis that's too complex to operationalize at scale. It requires too much critical thinking and discretion, and throwing a million human reviewers at it will just result in the kind of capricious false positives that are also railed against on HN and elsewhere (perhaps rightfully), with an undoubtedly high amount of false negatives too. There are constant ignorant-layman calls for magical tech moderation that only touches bad targets and never steps on the good little guy, but none of the people making these blithe demands ever stop and think about whether this is possible, beyond "they're rich and smart, they definitely know how to do it".