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This guy is upset that the free service he uses employs imperfect AI and it affected him personally. I agree we shouldn't be using AI for everything and we migh

• Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I don't have a Twitter account and I never will at this rate, since all I ever hear about Twitter is what a shithole it is. Twitter isn't showing me ads and I'm not posting things that could draw more users to Twitter to see more ads. That seems like a real cost to me
  • wlonkly 4y ago
    There's some selection bias there, though. "I had a nice conversation with some distant friends and discovered an interesting person" isn't newsworthy.
• MegaButts 4y ago
  > You cannot possible be this dense. This is your idea of verbal abuse? Obviously this is subjective, but I would laugh at you if you said this to me - like literally laugh in your face. No, at some point you have to say the problem is being overly sensitive towards anyone complaining about your fuckup. The guy is right, and they fucked up - he shouldn't have to bend over backwards because they're fucking babies. Maybe they should try to have some accountability and integrity and try to fix the problem rather than get all pissy about someone who's being civil (the problem is nobody can agree on what's civil, and I understand this is not an easy problem). From my perspective, you are the problem here. And that's the thing, everybody sees it differently.
  • hwillis 4y ago
    Right... do you yell at waiters and phone support people too? You're doing that to someone who has absolutely nothing to do with the problem you are having, is probably often harrassed by people like you, and who are at literally the lowest rung on the ladder. You're making people's day worse for absolutely no reason except that you can't make yourself feel better without being obnoxious to someone else.
    • MegaButts 4y ago
      This has nothing to do with making people feel better. It's about holding twitter accountable to their own policies. What do you suggest I do if not use their own support system? The next step is to blast social media. "You cannot possibly be this dense" is referring to whoever is making the decision. If the support team has the ability to overturn this decision, and they maintain the decision, then they are indeed the problem and deserving of far more abuse than that. If they are unable to change the decision then why do they care if I insult their company policy, especially since they hopefully have the autonomy to recognize the stupidity of it? They should be able to laugh about how dumb it is too. You are asking me to be civil with twitter when they are not being civil themselves. I have no respect for hypocrites.
      • hwillis 4y ago
        Support systems have absolutely nothing to do with holding anyone accountable ever, and I don't know why you think they would. > "You cannot possibly be this dense" is referring to whoever is making the decision. Is this random guy making 8.50 supposed to read your mind? The person reading your brilliant commentary is not going to send it upwards for you. Literally the only person reading it is the guy you sent it to. You're acting like the random support guy is an idiot, and when you do that he's going to also assume you're an idiot, because you're acting like one when you send a message to one guy and say "you're dense" while actually referring to some third party.
        • MegaButts 4y ago
• LightHugger 4y ago
  I always find it funny when people get up in arms about "verbal abuse" and somehow don't care about the abuse inherent in the situation. Somehow the perpetuation of the abuse is justified by someone having an imperfect response, dear god. But i suppose you view him as an uppity supplicant who offended the king. Therefore he's a jerk and deserves it, according to you? This is not a view of things that actually solves the problem long term. The "jerk" is being far more productive than you, he is far above you. When this happens to you, you write a 'polite' reply and get ignored all the same you probably won't even notice because you're too busy calling people jerks for getting banned by AI.
  • pdpi 4y ago
    Two wrongs don't make a right. Twitter banning him for "Revenge Porn" over a video of Stray is really not a great look, and the ban should've been immediately reversed on appeal. Him being abusive to the moderation team (who likelier than not have nothing to do with the team that built the AI moderation system) is completely uncalled for, though, and deserves punishment Funnily enough, what I think is the right outcome here would come across as incredibly petty: Appeals process is successful, and the ban over literal cat video is reversed; however, there is now a new ban due to abuse of the moderation team, which will have its own appeals process.
    • ansible 4y ago
      Agree on your proposed outcome. If you have done any sort of social media moderation, you will very quickly develop an immediate reaction to even a trace of abuse or hostility from the users. There are so, so many assholes on the Internet, and you can't fix them. The more effort you put in to one incident, the more of your time these assholes will take up. The CS rep handling this particular case has dozens of others to handle that same hour. They don't care about you, the user, because you are not a customer, you are the product, and your are easily replaceable. The CS rep's boss also doesn't care about you.
      • Nullabillity 4y ago
        > They don't care about you, the user, because you are not a customer, you are the product, and your are easily replaceable. The CS rep's boss also doesn't care about you. And this right here is the root of the problem. The problem isn't that customers are "abusive", it's that CEOs and stock holders can offload the fruits of their own abuse onto people who are powerless to change anything. It's not exactly a surprise that that breeds resentment from both sides.
• saxonww 4y ago
  Yes, it was rude. And if Twitter wants to ban someone for being rude, that's their prerogative and I support it. I also support the rude person relating how they were banned for violating a rule they don't think they could possibly have violated, and I can look at it and say "Wow this person was rude but that was yet another instance of Twitter being stupid. I probably wouldn't like this person. I'm also not interested in using Twitter." Also: while we'll never know for sure, do you really think the appeal would have been successful if he instead wrote "Hello Twitter, could you take another look at this? I posted a 5 second clip from a new video game about a stray cat, and was banned for violating your revenge porn rule. Can you help me understand how the rule applies to this clip? Sincerely, User"? Because I sure don't.
  • cgriswald 4y ago
    I think the chances were slim. I think he reduced those chances significantly by being rude. Assuming someone who can help sees his blog post, I think he's also reduced his chances that they'll want to spend their time helping him.
• rpdillon 4y ago
  I wouldn't characterize "You can't possibly be this dense" as verbal abuse. Twitter loses credibility every time they enforce their own policies inconsistently. OP's incredulity that an actual human could look at that video and think it was revenge porn seems well-placed. The points about whether OP has paid Twitter money seem irrelevant; this is about Twitter enforcing their own policies correctly, not about some kind of standard of paid customer service.
• blargey 4y ago
  It’s rude towards Twitter. This is not a conversation, it’s a box in a form. One of many copies of the same form they’re churning through. I don’t understand why a CS rep / moderator reviewing appeals would take it as a personal slight, because that would require personally identifying with Twitter and its algorithms. Do you think people should be banned for being snippy in a customer satisfaction survey too? Product reviews? A human reads it. A human that should know well enough that they’re not the subject of any negativity therein. The idea that this is a CS rep’s petty revenge is as much of an unsubstantiated fantasy as “they’ll tell the cook to spit in your burger”. It’s far more likely that either the human reviewer(s) is doing a poor job, or there’s something else broken about the appeal process, considering all the other comments referencing nonsensical failed appeals with no evidence of “rudeness”. Like false positives in appeals going uncounted because the appeal decision is itself taken as the source of truth, and reps being incentivized to churn through appeals quick to save on labor costs.
  • adamlett 4y ago
  • cgriswald 4y ago
    The support person is almost certainly incentivized to get through as many appeals as possible. He's also probably paid very little. He has basically no incentive to help this guy and this guy gave him a disincentive. There's also likely correlation between people who speak this way to others and people whose bans were legitimate. Next. Spitting in a burger is active malice that can get you in legal trouble and I've still seen it happen. (For the record, I didn't let the burger go out and the guy got fired.) There was also a case where a local restaurant cook actively poisoned people he didn't like. Choosing not to help someone when you could is passive and it happens all the time. The worst consequence is you lose your job. One of the few freedoms of low paying jobs is that replacing those jobs is very easy. If you don't believe these things happen, start talking to retail and support employees. Or you can find plenty of forums where people talk about this type of thing. Do I think employees need to recognize that they are representing their company and no one is saying these things to them personally? Yes. Do I think people need to stop talking to "companies" this way? Also yes, even if only because they're more likely to get what they want that way.
• lapcat 4y ago
  I think what you're missing here is that the author is not looking for your sympathy, nor Twitter's sympathy. There's a larger point the author wishes to make about Twitter: > Somehow they can do this, but racial slurs are generally pretty okay, white supremacy is largely ignored, and every Twitter troll I’ve reported for harassment gets a three-week investigation and then a “We find they did not violate our rules” email. Note also that the author's goal is not getting unsuspended by Twitter, but rather this: > I’ll not tweet for months if it gets someone to write “We as a company think the cat is revenge porn” in an email.
  • cgriswald 4y ago
    I think you're being overly generous here. He doesn't offer examples of the harassment he reported. Even if he had, he's comparing Twitter AI-flagged revenge porn posts against user-reported harassment posts. The former is pretty clear cut and Twitter flagged it themselves. The latter may be a judgment call and was probably reported by the alleged target. His rudeness undercuts any such argument anyway, since we can't be sure the rep who reviewed his case didn't just see this and not waste his time on it. His main point seems to be "Twitter sucks." I agree. It sucks. So I don't use it.
    • lapcat 4y ago
      > Even if he had, he's comparing Twitter AI-flagged revenge porn posts against user-reported harassment posts. The former is pretty clear cut and Twitter flagged it themselves. The latter may be a judgment call and was probably reported by the alleged target. I would consider humans manually reporting tweets to be much more reliable than AI flagging, especially given the bizarre false positive results we've seen from Twitter AI flagging. I've personally reported tweets, with the same kind of non-results. Mostly bots though rather than harassment. > His main point seems to be "Twitter sucks." I agree. It sucks. So I don't use it. Well, the author isn't using it right now either, intentionally.
      • cgriswald 4y ago
        > I would consider humans manually reporting tweets to be much more reliable than AI flagging, especially given the bizarre false positive results we've seen from Twitter AI flagging. Sure. However, in this case Twitter is the one with the AI and the one deciding whether to trust a source. The case for child porn is virtually binary and even where it isn't, they're going to lean on the side of not allowing something. The case for harassment is reported by unknown humans who are probably personally involved, and whether something is or is not harassment is not always black and white. From Twitter's point of view, it probably makes more sense to trust their own AI. Here, the author hasn't provided specific examples of alleged harassment, so readers can't even make a judgment call.
• q-big 4y ago
  > This guy is upset that the free service he uses Twitter is not free. It's just that the payment is not money, but personal data, generating content that Twitter can use, and being a viewer of ads.
  • dantheman 4y ago
• ineedasername 4y ago
  >He stopped being right with his verbal abuse. No. He did not stop being right about a mistake, and its reasonable remedy, by making an unrelated mistake himself. You might argue that the reasonable remedy to his abuse is also to receive a ban, but that is a different argument. It should also be logged as a separate disciplinary actions, not just because a petty Twitter employee got their nose tweaked by a frustrated user that had been mistreated with false accusations.
  • cgriswald 4y ago
    I don't think we disagree here. He's right about the ban, but he's made the situation more complex and he's not right about the whole situation.
• SZJX 4y ago
  I find it really funny so many people are up in arms against this perceived “verbal abuse”. The “you” he filled out in the appeal form clearly refers to Twitter as a platform. Maybe it would be clearer if English actually distinguished between the plural form and the singular form of “you”, like in various other languages? Perceiving this as a personal insult is exactly a “pride” issue of the Twitter employee and some of the commentators here, not the author.