4 ms·

He seems to be intending to take Twitter back to the type and scale of content moderation social media firms had pre-2015, which is perhaps not co-incidentally

He seems to be intending to take Twitter back to the type and scale of content moderation social media firms had pre-2015, which is perhaps not co-incidentally when they achieved their huge levels of growth. Too many HN readers appear to be trying to convince themselves of this idea: that content moderation is some insanely hard problem. It's not. Social media grew to billions of users with relatively straightforward policies. It only seems that way now because the type of people who are obsessed with "moderation" (read: banning ideas they don't like) also struggle to crystallize a coherent set of beliefs about what speech should and should not be allowed. The absurd false positive and noise rates on Twitter/FB moderation is evidence of this. In place of coherent policies there is an inconsistent and ever-shifting set of unwritten rules that must be reverse engineered by outsiders to even begin to understand the underlying "logic". Reverting to a classical policy of: 1. No spamming. 2. No engaging in illegal activity (e.g. financial fraud, CP, copyright infringement). 3. Tweets that violate local laws will be hidden in that jurisdiction. along with the usual boilerplates you find in any 2010-era ToS, would be plenty sufficient and would not in fact pose problems harder than literal rocket science.

jansen555 4y ago
calciphus 4y ago
The challenge seems to be that 1-3 in your list are highly subjective. 1. Requires a common definition of spamming. If a bot is posting headlines for the NYT on their official account is that spam? A person really eagerly replying to everyone about their favorite band? Someone trying really hard to sell you their diet pills? Musk seems to think all these are equally OK (except maybe the nyt bot). 2. Musk has been sanctioned by the SEC for illegal stock manipulation based on his tweets. He argues he should be able to. Who decides? 3. What about calling a British citizen a pedofile because you're angry he didn't like your idea? In the UK that's a crime (libel laws are different than the US, and I'm certainly no expert) but simply hiding it to UK citizens doesn't actually comply with the laws. Jurisdiction isn't clear cut. The examples I gave are reasons why a self-described "free speech absolutist" probably isn't going to be adequately equipped to tackle these issues. Content moderation at scale - leaving out political content or opinions - requires proactive decisions that are often murky at best. And many can have consequences for the platform, especially with both sides of the American political system attacking Section 230 and seeking to hold those platforms responsible for the content of their users.
- native_samples 4y ago
  1. Yes, but in practice people have a good shared understanding of what spam means. Email filters have few problems with defining this. To answer your questions: 1a. No, automated posting is not spamming any more than a mailing list is the same thing as spam. 1b. No, a fan "really eagerly replying" is not spam. 1c. Someone "trying really hard" to sell diet pills can be, you've been too vague to answer there. Generally, sites impose usage limits on accounts to something reasonable that few people will ever hit organically. Whether you post within those limits using tools or manually doesn't matter. Then the rules say you're not allowed more than a small number of accounts. Anti-spam then mostly boils down to stopping people working around the usage limits. Musk very obviously doesn't think they're all the same and it's a strawman to claim it is. I used to work in anti-spam and the stuff you're raising is easy. Spam fighting is hard, but not getting distracted by ideological noise that's trying to argue political censorship = spam fighting is really, really easy.
  - calciphus 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376 Musk himself claims that the only curtailment is "what is prohibited by law". This isn't some tweet dragged from his history, either. It's from two days ago, and is on this topic.
    - native_samples 4y ago
      He's also talked about solving the spambot problem. These two things are not in tension. People seem to acting like Musk's position is full of gotcha's or some incredibly complex experiment that's never been tried before. It's not. That policy was and still is used by many different discussion forums for a very long time. It's actually the post-Trump Twitter approach that's the experiment here and it's been failing hard.

jansen555 4y ago

calciphus 4y ago

The challenge seems to be that 1-3 in your list are highly subjective. 1. Requires a common definition of spamming. If a bot is posting headlines for the NYT on their official account is that spam? A person really eagerly replying to everyone about their favorite band? Someone trying really hard to sell you their diet pills? Musk seems to think all these are equally OK (except maybe the nyt bot). 2. Musk has been sanctioned by the SEC for illegal stock manipulation based on his tweets. He argues he should be able to. Who decides? 3. What about calling a British citizen a pedofile because you're angry he didn't like your idea? In the UK that's a crime (libel laws are different than the US, and I'm certainly no expert) but simply hiding it to UK citizens doesn't actually comply with the laws. Jurisdiction isn't clear cut. The examples I gave are reasons why a self-described "free speech absolutist" probably isn't going to be adequately equipped to tackle these issues. Content moderation at scale - leaving out political content or opinions - requires proactive decisions that are often murky at best. And many can have consequences for the platform, especially with both sides of the American political system attacking Section 230 and seeking to hold those platforms responsible for the content of their users.

native_samples 4y ago
1. Yes, but in practice people have a good shared understanding of what spam means. Email filters have few problems with defining this. To answer your questions: 1a. No, automated posting is not spamming any more than a mailing list is the same thing as spam. 1b. No, a fan "really eagerly replying" is not spam. 1c. Someone "trying really hard" to sell diet pills can be, you've been too vague to answer there. Generally, sites impose usage limits on accounts to something reasonable that few people will ever hit organically. Whether you post within those limits using tools or manually doesn't matter. Then the rules say you're not allowed more than a small number of accounts. Anti-spam then mostly boils down to stopping people working around the usage limits. Musk very obviously doesn't think they're all the same and it's a strawman to claim it is. I used to work in anti-spam and the stuff you're raising is easy. Spam fighting is hard, but not getting distracted by ideological noise that's trying to argue political censorship = spam fighting is really, really easy.
- calciphus 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376 Musk himself claims that the only curtailment is "what is prohibited by law". This isn't some tweet dragged from his history, either. It's from two days ago, and is on this topic.
  - native_samples 4y ago
    He's also talked about solving the spambot problem. These two things are not in tension. People seem to acting like Musk's position is full of gotcha's or some incredibly complex experiment that's never been tried before. It's not. That policy was and still is used by many different discussion forums for a very long time. It's actually the post-Trump Twitter approach that's the experiment here and it's been failing hard.