3 ms·

The allegation here is that its the government doing it. Do you really think Twitter wants to take on governments?

• birksherty 7y ago
  Shutting 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 ago
    Can 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".