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Instagram, Twitter blame glitches for deleting Palestinian posts
- jazu 5y agoThe glitch has a hooked nose
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 07121941 5y agoYou're joking, I swear they've used this excuse before. Also, can an algorithm be Zionist?
- vmception 5y agoIt takes a lot of naivete to at least not even acknowledge the misaligned incentives The Jewish CEO of Facebook/Instagram not participating in the gaslighting of everyone that questions Israeli judicial processes and outcomes? Thats literally what is happening! We perceive one reality and they say thats not valid, the exact thing you think is happening is a glitch!
- bobthechef 5y agoAny news on the YouTube/Susan Wojcicki front? I know that the ADL was "advising" them wrt censoring supposedly antisemitic posts (i.e., posts the ADL doesn't like). I wouldn't be surprised if we saw similar videos disappear there as well. We have precedent in both cases.
- darig 5y agoAI tends towards the logical truth, so probably not.
- pydry 5y agoThe algorithm will likely reward whomever spends the most effort and money trying to game it.
- whatshisface 5y agoAn algorithm can't be anything-ist, but a company can prioritize finding and fixing some bugs over finding and fixing others.
- legulere 5y agoStatistical algorithms like in machine learning can reproduce human racism that is fed to them. That does not mean that the creator or user of such algorithms is racist, but it is their responsibility.
- whatshisface 5y agoLike airplane accidents, algorithms accidents are products of whole organizations, which include engineers, but are not only engineers. I don't condone blaming individual engineers for incidents when there is an entire system of quality control and management surrounding them that is supposed to proactively prevent these kinds of things. Nonetheless, it is possible for the whole system to be negligent, and it's also possible for the whole system to, if not be racist (because organizations don't have sentiments), to act collectively in a way that aligns with what a racist would do, if they were an organization. I admit that it's a stretched analogy and borders on anthropomorphizing organizations, but at the same time it could be a useful conceptual tool. For a concrete example, imagine that a company was prioritizing investigation of moderator actions based on the average emotional reaction of twelve or so people on an accountability board, when presented with each case. If the accountability board has any biases that don't average to zero across the dozen, the diverse stream of injustices will get corrected more in one direction than another, and the result will be injustice even in the absence of any individual with bad intentions.
- krona 5y agoPoint taken, but to be clear: bias doesn't imply racism, no matter how hard you might want it to.
- guerrilla 5y agoI don't understand what you mean. It reproduces the racism of the authors, no? It's just an extension of the producers. Like I guess you could say the hammer in the hand of a racist hitting you isn't itself racist but I think the point of people saying some tool is racist is to say that it is in some way designed to reproduce their own racism (even if completely accidentally and unintentionally.) But is something designed so like a hammer or is it something more specific?
- rvz 5y agoSo it is 'gLiTcheS' now or was this another 'acCIdENt' with their 'bots' when they declared it was “suspended in error by our automated systems”? Which one is it? [0] Somehow it was not an accident when users were tweeting 'hammer' a few months back and getting suspended but this somehow falls under a 'glitch' (Yeah right). Perhaps, another 'accidental glitch' once again by those who give no explanation of how it happened other than a vague description of the 'issue'. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127997
- lenitabinol 5y agoThis topic generates so much negative discussion... I am still trying to wrap my head around it
- autismautarch 5y agoIt isn't that hard, just the follow up of 70+ years of deception.
- mvzvm 5y agoyou mean 70 years of attacks on Israel, a legitimate state, by terrorists and rogue nations that lose every time?
- xdennis 5y agoI'm surprised you say just 70. Typical antisemites say The Jew has been deceiving for millennia.
- Nemrod67 5y agoTypical AIPAC people say that it's antisemites that began 6 millions years ago mate. I guess we're not out of trouble yet
- bobthechef 5y agoI'm not sure what's so difficult to understand. Unless you're extraordinarily naive and have been living in the Tubbytronic Superdome, it is pretty clear that this is likely another case of BigTech censorship. It might not be, of course, but very likely given what we know.
- dvt 5y agoI'm no fan of the man, but banning Trump, in retrospect, will be a mistake. From now on, Instagram/Twitter/FB will have to start taking sides in civil wars, religious disputes, and geopolitical disagreements. The Israel/Palestine conflict now has a new front. The Ayatollah is literally calling for more missiles to be fired[1] at Israel on Twitter. The lingering question is how, exactly, do you deal with this? [1] https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1392175039181623301 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1392175039181623301
- metalliqaz 5y agoif one side is directly inciting violence, then yeah, they will have to "take sides"
- pjc50 5y agoAnd if both sides are inciting violence?
- asdfrewqzxcv 5y agoban/censor both sides, problem solved :)
- dvt 5y ago> if one side is directly inciting violence Who determines this? If I ask my Jewish friends, they'll say Palestine is inciting violence. If I ask my Palestinian friends, they'll say Israel is. Who should Twitter ban?
- legulere 5y agoYour friends are not contradicting each other, we could also ban both.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aparsons 5y agoI remember a post here this year about Big tech being used as a tool of oppression. The poster was laughed out, but this is a very real issue. Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117559
- SCUSKU 5y agoAfter the liveleak shutdown, I was worriedly looking for alternatives. In the HN thread there was mention of theync.com which features many graphic videos. Viewing some of these videos reminded me that in the US we (white collared workers) live in a very safe and comfy bubble. I imagine these are the videos that are being filtered out by the low paid content moderators of Youtube/Facebook/Instagram, etc. I feel that this filter partially allows us ignore the severity of the issues occurring in the world. It is one thing to read about atrocities, but something completely different to witness them occur on video. Though traumatic, it is probably a good idea to expose ourselves to some of these videos to remind ourselves that we do in fact play a role, albeit small, in these events. When human rights violations occur in the world, we collectively need to respond. As technologists, I suppose one way to help would be to arouse public responses by supporting efforts to help distribute this content via federated platforms like PeerTube, Matrix, Mastodon. But then again, maybe this is completely naive as time and time again the US has turned a blind eye to many atrocities. Anyhow, I digress...
- Barrin92 5y agoreminds of the 'accidental glitches' after anti-Modi posts vanished in India, curiously enough shortly after India pressured social media companies into silencing dissent. People who think of centralised social media as an empowerement of voice of minority dissent have made a grave mistake. It's only contingently supportive as long as the position of the minority voices isn't in conflict with political or economic interests of the powers that be. And big anything be it government, business and so on is always run by people who come from the same power-centres that minorities are trying to speak up against.
- bobthechef 5y agoOr the minority known as the American oligarchy.
- darkwizard42 5y agoI think it is a LOT simpler than what you are suspecting. As someone in the comments has pointed out, mass reporting on certain types of articles or certain sources trigger automated review/removal of that content. Normally, consensus reporting is a good sign that something is undesirable. In this case it has clearly been weaponized. This is a TUNING problem and it seems like social media companies have to find a way to balance on this
- serf 5y ago>This is a TUNING problem and it seems like social media companies have to find a way to balance on this OK -- to play nice, let's say it's a tuning problem. Why didn't this 'tuning problem' get fixed the first few times politically motivated messages got 'disappeared'? At what point does the responsibility lie on those massaging the tuning methods? my personal view is that social media is heavily gamed by the three-letter-agencies and all of their equivalents abroad. The existence of internal 'squads' within most of these groups that focus on social media networks reinforces that personal view -- if it wasn't an important battle ground then why form squadrons to seize and control it?
- 5y ago
- ttmb 5y agoThe most likely explanation is that coordinated mass reporting of these posts is triggering removal algorithms. In that sense, the "glitch" is that the removal algorithms are susceptible to being gamed.
- newsclues 5y agoOr there is someone(s) within the organization that has moderation privilege and they are exploiting their access for ideological reasons. I think both are occurring in social media networks to some extent
- bern4444 5y agoI highly doubt that individuals at each company are actively manually deleting tweets or instagram posts.
- teclordphrack2 5y agoisrael has done more than that, so has the usa. Heck, you can get a check on the side to be an inside mole.
- abeppu 5y agoAsymptotically as the size of the staff that can delete things grows, the probability that at least one of them would be willing to delete things for "ideological purposes" will approach 1, right?
- snakeboy 5y agoThe internal monitoring and codified repercussions also grow at the same time, I'd hope..
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoFor sure, and we may well end up seeing some number of content moderators fired. As with any major crisis, there's gonna be people who feel that it's worth losing their job over.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoWhen it comes to hot-button geopolitics, is there such a thing as a reverse Hanlon's Razor? Where you should be attributing such "glitches" to malice and not stupidity?
- majjgepolja 5y agoDon't attribute to bugs what can be attributed to features.
- nelsondev 5y agoMy wild guess is JIDF [1], or a similar organization, is using multiple accounts to flag posts as violating community standards. Once it reaches a certain threshold of “downvotes”, some algorithm by Twitter/Instagram hides the content. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Forc...
- ars 5y agoThat doesn't exist anymore.
- colordrops 5y agoEither it does in secret, or there are now multiple more effective groups. There's absolutely no way they just stopped doing this.
- tartoran 5y agoWhat goes around comes around
- amoshi 5y agoJIDF doesn't exist anymore but others have replaced it, eg ACT.il, they use "hasbara" documents that describe how to use logical fallacies and how to twist history to win online arguments. It's a really disgusting document. https://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fmedia%2F70%2Ftip_report.pdf https://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsw...
- munk-a 5y agoThe geographic description offered in the article is interesting to me... well, except for Columbia who knows what's going on there - it sounds like this may actually have been a legitimate tool accident since American Indigenous peoples and Palestinians are likely to register as existing in one nation and then frequently border hop in quick succession. If an automatic tool saw tweets from a certain user coming from IP Addresses in Australia and the UK interleaved during the same day it might mark that activity as spoofing - the palestinian border is incredibly complicated so I would be amazed if some users didn't constantly bounce back and forth during a daily commute. Indigenous communities are probably in a similar situation - they might have a cell tower or two marked as being within the rez with several other surrounding ones being marked as being in america proper and, due to hills, trees and whatever - their phone constantly bounces back and forth between the two.
- diebeforei485 5y agoLook, when these glitches are all in the same direction, there is something systemic going on - even if it is unintentional.
- seumars 5y ago“We’re sorry we have to censor you for profit” Oh great thanks Instagram.
- amrrs 5y agoHappened with LinkedIn as well. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6797910928844230656-ZZbh https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6797910928844230656-... So, as somebody pointed out I guess it's the mass reporting with bunch of humans or bots knowing that the algorithm would trigger. Perhaps like DDoS on Social media posts
- charlesju 5y agoTo be fair to IG/Twitter there seems to be a spam campaign on behalf of the Palestinian people. For example, look at the top comments on any Justin Bieber post lately: https://www.instagram.com/p/COwqsQRH3Rj/ https://www.instagram.com/p/COwqsQRH3Rj/ This probably happening all over the internet and these posts got swept up with the latest bot catching algorithms.
- meowface 5y agoI have no idea what actually happened here (maybe a mixture of things), and I know a lot of people don't necessarily think some powerful billionaire deserves any pity, or they may think he's actually involved in censoring things himself, but I kind of feel sympathy for Jack Dorsey. What a mess.
- almog 5y agoThis just goes to demonstrate what might be triggering these false positive auto-moderation, but it shouldn't justify it. What I mean is that if the model they use for flagging would infer that legit spam (comments to a post by Justin Bieber AFAIK isn't related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) could mean that similar content when applied to relevant content is still spam (or marked for deletion for other reasons). It's a bit like if google page rank algorithm identified a website being copied by multiple websites and punished the website that was the first to publish that content instead of other way around. If that was the case, it would have obviously been exploited to bury competitors pages.
- charlesju 5y agoI think what probably happened is these people (real or bots) posted on every major influencer and liked each other's posts to get them to the top of the posts. Which is very similar to what a spam bot ring would do.
- nradov 5y agoThere is currently also a Palestinian spam campaign on Facebook. Look at recent posts from popular media pages on completely unrelated topics. The comments are flooded with repetitive Palestinian messages.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoPlease leave the geotagged posts alone. Yours truly, IAF xoxo
- dukeofdoom 5y agoIts time to realize that Media companies have been lying their asses off for many years. So many people still believe what their TV tells them. And will grasp for any plausible explanation that still keeps their world view intact. No matter how many twists of logic it may be.
- curiousgal 5y agoI mean YouTube was caught modifying uploaded videos and Reddit CEO was caught editing comments, it all has been obvious for years.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 5y agoWhy do you think Internet media is different? News outlets have political agenda, so do people who comment on reddit or create websites, it's inherently biased.
- kome 5y agoFor a few years, the internet helped the oppressed and the underdog to spread awareness, in contrast with mainstream media narratives. Now, the rich and powerful gamed the system to continue the oppression.
- oogabooga123 5y agoFollow the money (equity ownership). This isn’t complicated
- TechBro8615 5y agoIt’s been interesting to see how the Israel/Palestine conflict falls outside the normal lines of left/right divide. You’d expect most of the lefties to side with the Palestinians since they’re the most analogous to the protected groups these people are usually so concerned with. But it turns out if you’re a leftie who happens to also be Jewish, you’re far more likely to support government violence than your political views might suggest.
- temp8964 5y agoIs Hamas rocket attack considered as "government violence"?
- vinay427 5y agoSure, if you subscribe to a broader definition of "government violence" that also probably includes aboriginal North Americans in militias haphazardly shooting arrows at European settlers that had firearms and had occupied their land by force.
- yamrzou 5y agoNot necessarily. See for example Jewish Voice For Peace: https://twitter.com/jvplive https://twitter.com/jvplive https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
- fortran77 5y agoIt’s interesting that the Left hates the indigenous people of Judaea and Samaria. They usually profess to like “indigenous peoples.”
- ptato 5y agoThe left hates what? The left profess to like indigenous people from where? It's interesting how people make weird sweeping statements like this that mean nothing and have no relation to any definition of left. I guess if you say that someone believes something nonsensical, it makes them look like the unreasonable one?
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe Guardian has recently written a series of articles about social media manipulation but it seems to go under the radar because it doesn't affect rich countries. This issue is very pernicious and deadly, that's why "glitches" is not enough of an explanation. I think it's worth investingating for inside operations. > https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-azerbaijan-ilham-aliyev https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-... Social media will continue to be important for societies, but the commercial ones failed to the point of being dangerous. We need to decentralize that
- nine_k 5y agoSocial media manipulation (a bad, nefarious thing!) is hard to tell apart form social media moderation (a good, virtuous thing!). Moderation is not just about removing illegal content (yes, most countries make certain content illegal, and publishing it, punishable). It's also about removing or de-emphasizing legal but unwanted content, various hooliganism, but also things the public sees as unwholesome, and flags as such. This, of course, also differs from country to country. Israel / Arab conflict is one of the worst in this regard. One half of it will tell you about terrible oppressors who capture land, bring military force, and keep peaceful people under a blockade. And they'd be correct. The other side will tell about terrible oppressors who rain rockets on peaceful cities, engage in acts of terror, and proclaim the need to eradicate the other side. They'd also be right. There is no way to make it peaceful and nice on Twitter when it is not peaceful and nice in the real life, for last like 60 years. There's no way any algorithm would look "fair" to people leaning either side, or even to people not caring enough to take sides. Sorry, this is an intrusion of ugly reality which technical means cannot conceal. In this regard, there's no good, fair, nice, etc solution for Twitter, or any other social media.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago> The other side will tell about terrible oppressors who rain rockets on peaceful cities, engage in acts of terror, and proclaim the need to eradicate the other side. They'd also be right. No, they really wouldn't. An occupied people cannot be considered "oppressors"--they are the ones being oppressed. Palestinian casualties over the last few decades are roughly 10x Israeli casualties. Israel is a nuclear-armed state backed by the US government. The Palestinians don't even have a formal military. Trying to put equal blame on the Palestinians is just providing cover for the Israeli's on-going genocide of Palestinians.
- sneak 5y agoAutomated centralized censorship that fails closed and only gets fixed later, by human intervention, is the glitch here. It has not been fixed.
- artur_makly 5y ago_.-._ ..-.. _.-._ (_-.-_) /|'.'|\ (_'.'_) .\-/. \)\-/(/ ,-.-. __/ /-. \__ __/ ' ' \__ __/'-'-'\__ ( (___/___) ) ( (_/-._\_) ) ( (_/ \_) ) '.Oo___oO.' '.Oo___oO.' '.Oo___oO.' see no evil hear no evil talk no evil
- CommanderData 5y agoAccounts have been banned by Instagram with hundreds of thousands of followers. It's simply censorship not a glitch.
- throwitaway12 5y agoEver since Twitter was seen to act in favour of one side politically than the other, I highly doubt it was just a 'glitch'.
- kennywinker 5y agoYou mean when they held a political leader to a much lower standard of good conduct than every other person on the platform is subject to including people on with opposing political views?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whatthesmack 5y agoNo, they just reinterpreted their policies to achieve the desired outcome (ie, permaban of said politician). It's amazing how flexible their policies are depending on who the subject is.
- kennywinker 5y agoWell, back in june 2020 this account copied 45's tweets and was quickly banned: https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/rest-of-the-world-news/this-account-behaves-like-donald-trump-to-know-twitters-policy-of-ban.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/rest-of-the-world-n... That suggests that they actually stretched their policies to accommodate NOT banning a political figure - since a non-political figure was banned for the same content.
- andyxor 5y agoGood, they shouldn’t promote terrorism
- King-Aaron 5y agoIt's just a glitch. A very targeted, conveniently timed glitch. That's all.
- smashah 5y agoWhoa,how come this glitch doesn't work for the IDF making memes and outright admitting to a campaign of terror? crazy how these glitches be. Paging IDF simps, please respond.
- slavboj 5y agoIt would be interesting to know how many Unit 8200 or other Israeli security service alumni work at these companies. https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/20/from-the-8200-to-silicon-valley/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/20/from-the-8200-to-silicon-v...
- agogdog 5y agoWeird how American companies make an awful lot of mistakes that happen to support American interests.
- _____bee 5y agoWith all these problems in current Social media platforms, isn't the time for de-centralized social platforms to flourish?
- nine_k 5y agoBut the centralized platforms flourish, in many respects, due to being centralized. Technical aspects aside, you know that there is one Twitter, and one Facebook, where "everybody" is, and "everything" gets reported. You can possibly think about a few dozen Mastodon instances where to look for "everything"? A bunch of Gnu Social nodes? A hundred of key large Telegram groups?.. The damned network effect pushes everything to a single biggest node :-\
- mdoms 5y agoNever going to happen. At some point we need to drop this stupid fantasy so we can start discussing real solutions.
- bitcurious 5y agoThe amount of blatantly antisemitic “the Jews control the media” trope comments in this thread is truly disturbing. If you have nothing more than insinuation to contribute, don’t.
- Nemrod67 5y agoWell it's a common trope that's based on some reality, ask Woody Allen. Doesn't mean your local jewish accountant goes to secret robed meetings to further their domination of the world :p
- joelbluminator 5y agoYour local jewish accountant huh, yeah you are an asshole.
- edanm 5y agoTo be fair to parent, I think stringing together a bunch of stereotypes was the point of the joke.
- imwillofficial 5y ago"I'm not saying it was aliens... But it was aliens."
- ReptileMan 5y agoLive by the Trump, die by the Trump. Once the ghost of ideological moderation is left out of the bottle it cannot be reigned in easily. Especially if applied arbitrary and without oversight. You will always have glitches that are convenient for someone.
- darthrupert 5y agoThere are pretty obvious propaganda and brigading efforts from Palestine's side on many subreddits like r/PublicFreakout -- small wonder that spam detectors are going crazy. Obviously Israel is doing intelligence work too, but probably subtly enough that it doesn't get flagged.
- say_it_as_it_is 5y agoInstigate a war with a sovereign nation and then document retaliation on social media, with help from naive bystanders.
- ultrastable 5y agonot implying any direct link, given that I have no idea if the guy even still works at Twitter, but: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-executive-british-army-officer-psyops-gordon-macmillan-a9127036.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-exec...