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Do you think that Twitter could possibly survive as a company without large amounts of automated moderation?
by ISL 4y ago
Do you think that Twitter could possibly survive as a company without large amounts of automated moderation?
- gambiting 4y agoIt couldn't, but what all of these companies could absolutely do is pair automated moderation with human review. When AI flags something as innapropriate, a human has to sign it off before it's removed or the account suspended. The only exception for it is when content matches a known hash for illegal content - then it should be removed automatically.
- ISL 4y agoHow many automated-review actions do you think Twitter performs in a day that would require such a review? How many seconds might each human-review take? What false-positive rate is acceptable on that human-review?
- gambiting 4y agoIs that an argument that they shouldn't do it then? Because right now, if this article is to be believed, they don't do manual review even on appeals. That's obviously not ok.
- Kalium 4y agoAs other commenters point out, that characterization is not not accurate. There were most definitely humans involved, including on appeal. Does that make things OK? I suppose that depends on whether you object more to the decision or the process.
- lapcat 4y agoNo. And that's why Twitter should not exist as a company. If they were legally required to have human moderation, they would go out of business. And IMO the world would be better off.
- edanm 4y agoI think if the phone companies can't monitor every conversation to make sure no one is planning a crime, they're clearly not actually able to scale in a correct manner and therefore we shouldn't have phones. (Obviously a different situation, but by what principle is it different?)
- lapcat 4y ago> Obviously a different situation, but by what principle is it different? The principle is that one is a public conversation, and the other is private. Private conversations between two people should not be moderated. Twitter should not auto-moderate Direct Messages, and they don't AFAIK.
- mantas 4y agoDo we need Twitter that much? Is it worth ruining the society in the name of having twitter or a similar social media? 90s and 00s with all sorts of independent discussion boards were great. Somehow moderation kept up without crappy AI. I can’t see a single benefit of Twitter/FB/etc over fragmented forums as a user.
- bandyaboot 4y agoI’m guessing the “somehow” has something to do with the order of magnitude fewer users on the internet.
- mantas 4y agoMore like forums were fragmented. Topics, geographically etc. And politics was either sophisticated forums or just a byproduct of those fragmented topics. More users, many of them lurkers, would just result in more fragmentation and niches in that old world. The old forums was safe from feeling of censorship too. If you didn’t like mods too much, you could not easily go to another forum or start your own.
- hinkley 4y agoWith fragmentation, several other things also happened. One, getting banned from one community was not the end of the world. You could join another. Two, because the forums were small, if you got banned from one, you couldn’t seek sympathy by complaining to the entire internet about the unfairness, because nobody knew about that community so getting them to care was a challenge. And three, you couldn’t complain to the entire internet because there was no soapbox large enough to do it. Only your friends and the new community had to listen to you complain. On the flip side, an angry user with some technical abilities could poison the well by trying to take your community offline. Whether they succeed or not depends on who has more patience, the custodian or the manchild throwing an extended tantrum. That is at least a one place where centralization helps. Getting resilience set up is a full time job. Though I suppose you could say that’s an area where technology might actually help.