15 ms·
Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
- elmcrest 6y agorofl I‘m also blocked
- dsego 6y agome too
- sabujp 6y agonice, it worked
- aqme28 6y agoI am now enjoying my 12 hour enforced break from Twitter.
- dgellow 6y agoSo, Twitter now has a no procrastination feature? :)
- optimalsolver 6y agoOn Hacker News?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 6y agoNot on an alt account?
- FeteCommuniste 6y agoI tried it and was locked for violating the rule against posting people’s “personal information.” I just appealed the account lock...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- that_guy_iain 6y agoI wonder if they‘ll unlock everyone when they release the fix. I kind of doubt they will.
- einarvollset 6y agoI’m still banned
- riffic 6y agohaha yeah right. after watching Twitter, Inc after all these years there's nothing left but to be cynical if they'll do the right thing.
- anonu 6y agoCan the word appear in a phrase and lock the account?
- MikeDelta 6y agoJust once? Not even three times and then it comes, like the Candyman or the Babadook?
- selimthegrim 6y agoIt’s Zalgo without the text corruption
- yuliyp 6y agoSounds like a strange text clustering false positive.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoApparently not everyone who tweets it gets their account locked.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- risho 6y agoYeah that definitely seems like a mistake. I tried it and it worked. I'm going to appeal it and see what happens. This must just be one of the algorithms going haywire or something.
- aneutron 6y agoSomeone in the thread suggested a more probable (somewhat substantiated) reasoning: They got banned for "revealing private information". OP is thinking that someone at twitter tried banning publishing some address in Memphis, but somewhat it got tokenized (?) and so Memphis is now blocked.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>This must just be one of the algorithms going haywire or something. That or maybe some random test code from development that got pushed into production by a series of accidents like a senior clicking Approve on the pull request of an intern without actually reviewing the code. Just a guess.
- stormqloud 6y agoSome twitter $2/hr contract worker for a subcontator (I knew nothing about the slave labor) on the other side of the world having fun.
- ALittleLight 6y agoIf that were true they would've blocked a more common word. "The" for example.
- idlewords 6y agoOne neat trick doubles your productivity!
- threevox 6y agoSocial media companies hate this weird trick!
- Spare_account 6y agohttps://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1371191885268672518 https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/13711918852686725... > What's possible is a Twitter staffer tried to block a street address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence, or the original was multi-line and they only pasted the city. What postal syntax in the US looks like an escape sequence?
- Y_Y 6y agoI got blocked too, and so was referring to the ancient Egyptian city. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
- rsj_hn 6y agoIIRC, Memphis, TN was named after the great city in Egypt and even has a Pyramid, although it may be a shopping center.
- whymauri 6y agoI've heard it's a giant Bass Pro Shop. Incidently, I'm driving by Memphis this Tuesday - now I'm inclined to check it out!
- laverya 6y agoThere's a great recent video on the Memphis Pyramid from Bright Sun Films [0] - 10th tallest pyramid in the world! 0: https://youtu.be/FEB-YG2iiYA https://youtu.be/FEB-YG2iiYA
- ALittleLight 6y agoCould be a typo or filling in whatever field incompletely - e.g. they meant to block a specific street address but only got the city name in the "block" field.
- swiftonsecurity 6y ago
- halotrope 6y agoI just tried. It works. But why?
- J253 6y agoUgh...I have a HN Twitter bot that just tried to post this and it got locked. https://www.twitter.com/hackernewstop10 https://www.twitter.com/hackernewstop10
- hirsin 6y agoOh no, I hadn't even thought of that. Yes, likely many bots locked for this.
- billrobertson42 6y agoIt doesn't appear to be locked now.
- JdeBP 6y agoApparently the company has very recently tweeted that a "bug" causing this has now been fixed.
- billrobertson42 6y agoGood for them. Bug, mistake, bad data, or whatever. Glad they fixed it.
- tom_mellior 6y ago"The company" hasn't tweeted about this either at https://twitter.com/twitter https://twitter.com/twitter or https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport. Link or it didn't happen.
- JdeBP 6y agoI said "apparently" because my source was a screenshot of a tweet saying "Sorry for that.", just as this Gizmodo reporter also saw. * https://gizmodo.com/twitter-banned-me-for-saying-the-m-word-memphis-1846474378 https://gizmodo.com/twitter-banned-me-for-saying-the-m-word-...
- baybal2 6y agoWorks as intended? I wonder if this is due to Memphis' association with racism, and it is an artifact of them trying to shut down the conversation about it becoming too overt by accident, instead of sneaky shadowbans, de-trending, and throttling.
- sayhar 6y agoYou're saying that twitter employees have a nefarious plan to ... throttle conversations about the american south?
- baybal2 6y agoMaybe not nefarious, just inept. You don't get censored on Chinese social media for discussing Xi Jinping's conduct in good, or bad light, it get censored for just discussing it. Most censors don't give a fuck evaluating what they are told to censor, they just ctrl+f click click... I don't doubt the attitude is shared across the pacific in the tech industry.
- riffic 6y agono, there is no valid reason for this. Someone shipped something bad into production and hasn't rolled it back yet.
- yokoprime 6y agoOh boy, the dumpster fire that just keeps on giving. I really hope Twitter does have audit trail on everyone being locked by this so they easily can unlock everyone again
- beckingz 6y agoAnd now we'll have the suspension on our record so future suspensions will be more severe. Automated moderation in action!
- Gibbon1 6y agoRandom thought of mine was companies use AI to moderate. But potentially malefactors can train the AI to flag harmless stuff. And because of the opaque nature of neural networks there isn't good mechanism to undo it, except by reverting.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SN76477 6y agoSure enough. Wow
- Traster 6y agoI love the sheer number of hacker news commenters saying “Well I tried it, seems to work”. At what level do you guys go “I’m just going to assume those 10 other guys aren’t lying”
- jchw 6y agoGetting blocked from using Twitter is a productivity hack :)
- cbozeman 6y agoDeleting your Twitter account is an even better one.
- BeFlatXIII 6y agoSame heuristic applies to HN accounts.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> At what level do you guys go “I’m just going to assume those 10 other guys aren’t lying” For something easily testable? Never. Edit: Account just got locked, lol.
- alexvoda 6y agoI am actually pondering if I should do this to lock my account.
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou get it back in 12 hours, so it is not a big deal.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoThis claim requires testing.
- jcpham2 6y agoWhat is this Twitter you speak of
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoThe proper syntax: 'What is this Twitter of which you speak?'
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoWhat type of dog is that?
- Shivetya 6y agoGoing to assume its a keyword flagged because of protests from last year?
- riffic 6y agoTwitter has increasingly slid into user-hostile territory. I moderate /r/Twitter on reddit and we have a pinned thread just showing nothing but complaint after complaint, because content moderation is a failure when you attempt to scale it. We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.
- dgellow 6y agoJust a small anecdote: I created a company account, then set the birthday to ~1 year ago, when the company was registered. Everything was fine for 5 minutes, then my account has been blocked with a notification telling me that I need to be at least 13 years old to use Twitter. I can still login but cannot access the settings to change the birthday (or just remove it) as a screen “fix your age or prove your identity” is blocking me from doing anything. I used their support form to send a proof of ID a few times but the account gets blocked again every time. Somehow twitter believes that 1 years old are trying to join their platform. That was more than 6 months ago, and still no solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- riffic 6y agoWhat shocks me is there is no warning that setting a date of birth is a dangerous action. The company is just hostile to its users.
- aaronmdjones 6y agoI lost my Discord account for daring to use the "change your e-mail address" feature. Nothing warned me that this was a potentially-destructive action. It happens.
- Marsymars 6y agoA year or two ago I went through every online account I have to change the email address. I should have kept a record of results. Some were good and easy. Some had no option other than an account closure. Some involved a single contact of support without any real verification that I was actually the account holder. Some involved a protracted string of contact with support that tried to claim I was asking for an impossibility. Some services kept my old email on file and I periodically receive something to my old address.
- NullPrefix 6y agoMost of you tweeted that to see if the autolock works. Sounds like a you problem to me.
- maxrev17 6y agoCan you explain that one? Lol
- NullPrefix 6y agoPure cynicism, but still... Most of the posters were expecting to be autolocked. Can't pretend to be suprised now, can they?
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26458641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26458641.
- NullPrefix 6y agoSure. But to be honest, I thought it was substantative, because "Sounds like a you problem" is a possible response from AI moderation. I know that it's not OK, but it does happen.
- surfer7837 6y agoI'm now enjoying a 12 hour ban from Twitter
- C19is20 6y agoI took the lifetime option and couldn't even be arsed signing up. Win for me as I can still Memphis.
- ricardobayes 6y agoI wonder how this was discovered in the first place.
- tedunangst 6y agoUsers: social media is too addictive. Twitter: we're testing out a new safe word feature to address that. They should keep this. Randomly pick a new word each day, anybody who says it gets locked for a day.
- ronsor 6y agoEventually everyone will get locked, and Twitter will be a much better place by virtue of having no users.
- drusepth 6y agoIt'd be interesting to see Twitter adopt the old "Robot 9000" automod rules, where every tweet would have to be unique from all previous tweets system-wide or else you get a temporary ban that exponentially grows in length after every infraction.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoAre you referring to /r9k/ ? There are only 10 pages visible on 4chan, did that rule only apply to visible content or all past content aswell?
- drusepth 6y ago/r9k/ was actually modeled after Randall Munroe's open-source "Robot9000" automod bot for one of XKCD's IRC channels (where unoriginal users would be muted for N time, rather than banned). The original post explaining it is here [1]. I'm not sure whether the 4chan implementation applied to just the 10 visible pages or all past comments. Fun fact: Twitch also has an r9k mode for chat [2] (that scopes "unique messages" per-chat over a 10-minute rolling window). [1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-a... [2] https://twitter.com/twitchsupport/status/382923694864994304?lang=en https://twitter.com/twitchsupport/status/382923694864994304?...
- mgamache 6y ago"We've temporarily limited some of your account features" Jesus how stupid...
- hyperpape 6y agoReminded of Rachel’s post about requiring confirmation for exceptionally destructive actions (https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/).
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoI don’t know how this relates to the twitter thingy, but it was a useful read, thanks! A relevant tag: #devops
- hyperpape 6y agoswiftonsecurity speculated that whoever banned “Memphis” meant to ban something like “123 Example Street, Memphis”, but hit an edge case in the parser or screwed up a regex or something. My thought is that the message “you’re about to ban 123,456 users, please confirm how many users you’re ready to ban” would have been a useful safeguard.
- Can_Not 6y agoMy thoughts on the matter is that Test Driven Design is pretty cool, and if you had never written a test before, this is the one of the easiest tests to write.
- ve55 6y agoIn general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we've ended up with. Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles. Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn't a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.
- h2odragon 6y agoKillfiles worked for usenet
- pfraze 6y agoI’m curious, How were those killfiles different than muting or blocking on Twitter? Usenet was a little before my time.
- robarr 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's like muting users. Or muting messages by topic. Essentially a more advanced and useful technology than any of the social networks offer today.
- tom_mellior 6y agoTwitter allows you to mute users, keywords, and I believe specific threads. Killfiles weren't more advanced than that.
- h2odragon 6y agoAs Twitter has been accepted as the ultimate arbiter of what may be said, I suggest the city of Memphis rename itself "Graceland," thus pleasing all the Elvis fans, boosting tourism, and avoiding sticky complications about legal technicalities.
- dgellow 6y agoWhat about Memphis, Egypt?
- yakk0 6y agoRamses?
- drdec 6y agoThey are welcome to steal Graceland's name, after all turn about is fair play.
- Laforet 6y agoIt's still not too late to rename their city Thebes - last time I checked the one in Greece burned down and they haven't had time to rebuild it, yet.
- einpoklum 6y agoYeah, that's been called "Manf" for probably over a 1,000 years now.
- tibbon 6y agoI got banned in 2008 for similarly silly (and unknowable) reasons. Posted zero, and I mean zero, spicy content. Maybe they didn’t like me posting a soy latte or a photo of a dog. But I got a ban for almost a week. And then suddenly it worked again, and they refused to say why or what triggered it. Maybe Jack or Ev got drunk and started hitting buttons. Zero transparency or apology, so I can only speculate. Tried this one out- said the super private magic word, and got a ban. Appealed it to ask them why.
- yakk0 6y agoAs a fan of the University of Memphis basketball team, this is not the weekend I'd like this to happen. Though with how our weekend is going maybe it's a good thing...
- mindfulplay 6y agoThis is the same level of expert AI that is being put to use in self driving cars (eg Tesla) and other critical faculty things. I hope the ethical AI people pursue these foundational issues in these AI ML thingamajiks.
- 1f60c 6y agoI (foolishly) took people at their word, thinking the bug had been fixed. It has not.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoSo, we can seem how Twitter's censoring works now, start at a word that's only associated with Memphis, then draw gradually closer. Alternative spellings, alternative utf-8 lookalikes, alternative characters (leet speak, etc.). Usually if a company blocks words they do common substitutes too like: memph1s, m3mfis, ... do they block rot13(), how about ₘeₘphis, ᶬ3ₘph15??
- yodelshady 6y agoEither the ban is over or utf-8 lookalikes are fine.
- smitty1e 6y agoI got away with the subtexual play: Maybe Everthing Merely Projects Hellish, Inimical Sophistry
- inglor_cz 6y agoCancel Culture 2.0: entire cities purged ;)
- trhway 6y agoMay be the Sodom and Gomorrah were just a similar automated system error, and the story that we know is just a spin by the heaven's PR department in the aftermath of the mistake. Also jives nicely with another topic - automated drones - at the top of HN today. Giving that Twitter with all its money has probably an AI among the best and still makes such a gaping errors...
- LegitShady 6y ago>May be the Sodom and Gomorrah were just a similar automated system error, They were clearly related to the salt mine meme
- w0mbat 6y agoRegular expressions are hard. Let's go shopping.
- JasonFruit 6y agoApparently fixed, judging by going to twitter.com/explore and searching for "Memphis".
- i_have_an_idea 6y agoIt is not fixed yet. Twitter lets you decide if you want to appeal the block or delete the tweet. Many people will appeal.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoNot everyone who tweets it gets blocked. It's not clear why.
- JasonFruit 6y agoI don't have a Twitter account anymore, so I couldn't test it.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoWrong! You can always create an account! This is a completely legitimate reason to do so.
- JasonFruit 6y agoI don't think that's at all a healthy response, given my history.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoLooks like there’s some exception, maybe blue ticks? https://twitter.com/swodinsky/status/1371187070815846400?s=21 https://twitter.com/swodinsky/status/1371187070815846400?s=2...
- sneak 6y agoAll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoWhy does every mediocre (let alone terrible and harmful) journalist get a blue tick on Twitter?
- i_have_an_idea 6y agoYeah, can confirm. It does work. I don't suggest trying it, as unlocking your account requires phone no. and email verification... yikes.
- leshenka 6y agoI tried to create a Twitter account once. 5 minutes after creation it got suspended and unlocking required a phone no. Same goes for Facebook
- pixl97 6y agoSame here. I let it stay suspended. Weeks later it came out that Twitter had a flaw that let anyone see your phone number. It will be a cold day in hell before I give them my number, and I survived the Texas icepocolypse this year.
- david_allison 6y agoFor Twitter: I believe that's just part of their signup flow Likely significant reduces the bounce rate compared to requiring a phone number while creating the account
- efreak 6y agoI've got a couple dozen accounts registered between defunct bots that were tied to irc bots or blogs, and single-use numbered accounts registered for contests and giveaways that required twitter. None of them has ever required any proof or phone number for registration. My primary account, which I use just as infrequently? Of course they asked for my phone number. I'm just annoyed I can't do 2fa without the twitter client or sms.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 6y agoReminds me of The Hhitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: > Belgium is the rudest word in the Universe, yet by a strange coincidence, also the name of a country on Earth. In the Secondary Phase of the radio series, it is stated as "completely banned in all parts of the Galaxy, except in one part, where they don't know what it means, and in serious screenplays.
- dylan604 6y agoDouglas Adams just had a way/understanding of the universe that I am grateful that he was able to share with us. I never did get the hang of Thursdays either.
- paulpauper 6y agoWhen it comes to cenrsohpip and selective enforcement of rules, twitter is the worst of the social networks. THE CEO has lied about ghosting and so many other things. terrible company.
- delecti 6y agoDoes it only happen if you tweet the word by itself, or even in context? I actually enjoy Twitter so I'm not willing to test myself. :P
- userbinator 6y agoAs the catchphrase goes, "The problem with censorship is that <censored>" I hope instances like these continue to drive people away from centralised and heavily-censored platforms. Personally, the only thing I do with Twitter is to read when I'm linked there, but now that they've started to block those who don't want to run their arbitrary code just to read some text and images, I have even less desire to use the site.
- giantrobot 6y agoI would like to coin a new phrase, the "Game Master Dilemma". For any self selecting group the number of people willing to do thankless hard work decreases with respect to the difficulty of the task considerate with the reward. In tabletop games there's often far fewer players willing to take the Game Master role because it's more difficult. The people that take the role have to really enjoy the task and the "reward" (good feelings because people had fun). This means there's far more players than Game Masters. I think this applies to everyone making (in my opinion) pithy statements about "centralized platforms". There's vastly more centralized-social-media-platform users than people with the technical capability, time, and money to run some smaller social media instance. The ratio of players to Game Masters is huge. It can be a lot of work/expense to run a board for even a small group of users. This means that larger more centralized platforms will end up being the norm because they centralize the infrastructure and lower the friction for users to do the interesting stuff like discuss topics or share cat pictures. Because the central platforms are being Game Masters players can flock to the platforms and network effects will draw more users. If you want some magical world of super decentralized community moderated social media (you basically want mailing lists) you need to solve the Game Master Dilemma. Infrastructure is not free in time or money. The more demands on the infrastructure the more it costs. The only decentralized community moderated platforms that will exist are ones where the Game Master to player ratio is low. The higher it gets the worse of a job it is being the Game Master until it's not worthwhile at all.
- Animats 6y agoIt's too bad Kafka didn't live long enough to see online moderation. We still have Cory Doctorow, of "Unauthorized Bread", of course.
- tyingq 6y agoSimilar, there's many short names you can add to a comment in a paypal payment that will get your paypal locked down. "CIMEX" is a good example. Thanks OFAC!
- kjrose 6y agoThis is pretty much the issues we are seeing more and more with centralized systems relying on automated systems for moderation with no method of appeal. I'd bet 90% of google accounts banned fall under something like this. And since there is no appeal, that means if you end up banned/peanlized/etc and you aren't rich/influential then you are screwed by a kafkaesque hell.
- poundofshrimp 6y agoI wonder what is wrong with the idea of letting users select the moderation algorithm for their feed? Is anyone working on this?
- reaperducer 6y agoMore proof that Elvis lives.
- PastaMonster 6y agoOn youtube you can have Thailand in the comment. If it do contain Thailand the comment will be auto-deleted. Thailand I can understand. Many people are homophobic and some made the mistake to take what looked like a woman home for some bed time and got upset when they realized they have made out with another man that whole time. But Memphis, I don't have a clue why twitter dislikes that place. Can someone fill me in, please?
- w_for_wumbo 6y agoI'm kinda surprised there isn't already a viral baiting tweet for this already.
- sneak 6y agoAt what point does it stop being reasonable to donate free content that attracts eyeballs to web hosts addicted to censorship? I left Twitter after a dozen years and many thousands of followers. You can, too. Tweeting anything gets you closer to the day Twitter locks your account and destroys all you've built. You won't even be able to view your follower or following lists at that point (and they're not in your data export), or any of the DMs you've sent or received over all those years.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agodamn ,what a time to start submitted OP (damnit, bots dropping like flies all over)
- paulpauper 6y agoTwitter ha a bunch of stupid, arbitrary rules. If you make a tweet comment that violates twitter's rules and are forced to verify your phone, all future tweets will be demoted to the bottom of comments where few people will see them. This is permanent and no way to ever fix it.
- georgyo 6y agoIf you venmo someone with the word Cuban in the message, it locks both accounts.
- bombcar 6y agoThis sounds like a powerful DoS tool.
- Disgardia 6y agoUnrelated but, how to unsuspend my account, my account got suspended maybe because it got detected as spam because I'm doing some retweet tasks
- iljya 6y agoOh, so this isn't about Twitter censoring disgruntled FedEx customers? ;)
- kodisha 6y agoSo, I've submitted same news hours earlier (from official 2600 mag twitter account) but my submission was flagged and locked for comments. -_-
- rsynnott 6y agoPresumably someone at Twitter just really hated Windows 98 :)
- p4bl0 6y agoIt's been fixed: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1371235587718582274 https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/137123558771858227... > A number of accounts that Tweeted the word “Memphis” were temporarily limited due to a bug. It’s been fixed and the accounts have now been restored. We’re sorry this happened.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 6y agoDidn’t lock mine