4 ms·

Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doe

Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules." People I didn't know, who I had zero negative interactions with before. That was way before Musk. You just can't have human moderation at that scale. They have to brainstorm how to prevent these tweets in the first place, rather than how to catch and delete them.

Waterluvian 4y ago
That’s awful. And I’ve also witnessed the same kind of abuse that goes ignored. Has any large social media site ever solved this? 4chan does by having no rules: if you show up, expect the absolute worst of humanity. Reddit does by having countless volunteer moderators who basically do 98% of the moderation. Facebook suffers from the same problems as Twitter.
- concinds 4y ago
  The way I'd solve it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 Basically, more siloed converations would ironically create a better "public town square", because it would reduce the need for moderation and allow freer speech. > That’s awful. And I’ve also witnessed the same kind of abuse that goes ignored. Honestly, it wasn't. Maybe due to my temperament (and I certainly received far less hate than high-profile people do) but I could never empathize with the "online bullying" concerns. It's the nature of the internet, and you just develop the mental strength to tune it out, or use it to your advantage as fuel. Even after those experiences I'd still be much happier with Musk's content policies, or Dorsey'd blockchain-free-for-all with users being able to choose the moderation algorithm they want. I have friends who were suspended for BS reasons and that's a far bigger concern to me.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Hmmm. Would you consider that to be similar to the Reddit model of cloistering themes so that unlike-minded people aren’t artificially pushed together?
    - concinds 4y ago
      The problem is that reddit clusters based on topic, rather than social group. If I'm a bad state actor who wants to influence America on a mass-scale, I buy a bunch of accounts, and buy upvotes, and can shift the hivemind. Or I just infiltrate the mod team. Obviously you'd need to be relatively sophisticated to not get caught. But Twitter is based on social circles, not topics; those concerns don't apply. Instead of having an entire topic/subreddit be biased one way or another, you'd have small friends groups and small communities, that have social dynamics that are as close to real life as possible. Hence all the scale-related problems don't occur. The radicalization rabbit hole? Doesn't happen with siloes. Harassment? There'll be much less with siloes, where someone needs to "add" you (like on Facebook) to interact with you, rather than a drive-by quote-tweet. Ideological censorship? Again, with siloes, there's less need for moderation, so people who aren't harming any others get to communicate with each other. It's more organic. Obviously implementing that isn't as easy, but there's good ideas for clustering in this thread.
      - tqi 4y ago
        TBH I don't think clustering on social groups is the panacea that you hope. Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. We'll never get back to the way things were before the internet became ubiquitous. Back then, we had a limited number of sources, and normal people had very limited reach. But now, it's too easy for individuals to pass information along, and with more sources of it the juiciest / most outrageous information will always go the furthest.
        concinds 4y ago
        May not be a panacea, but it's the healthiest option. > Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. That's true, but it's relatively easier to solve: really viral messages are a minuscule minority, and can set off internal alerts and be reviewed by humans; to prevent hysteria and murderous rhetoric. And the problem also existed with word-of-mouth, centuries ago, before the masses ever startied reading "the press"; rumors could spread across entire nations. Fake stuff will spread, and people will become more skeptical and adapt, as they did before. Skin in the Game makes a related point.¹ The whole problem with censoring "disinformation" is that it removes society's self-healing mechanisms. Public discourse has always been messy. Louis Farrakhan is labelled hateful, but he ran the Million Man March and is credited getting many African-American men to register to vote. Malcolm X would have been considered an extremist and banned. But it would have been wrong; he may have been flawed on the micro level (that's subjective), but he was beneficial and heroic on the macro level. Censorship has huge second order effects, including self-censorship, introducing status-quo bias. It also promotes conspiratorial thinking, since people who think information is being hidden from them are more likely to seek fringe sources. How do you censor real disinformation, without ending up with things like the Hunter Biden story being censored too? It also allows governments to lie with impunity, because accusations that the government is lying are treated as disinformation, while actual government lies (like the intel agency staffers who said the Hunter laptop was a Russian psyop) are spread everywhere.² People need to be able to spread "conspiracies", since while they may be factually incorrect, they may be directionally correct, while the "official" narrative may be total BS. Note I couldn't care less about Hunter or his laptop, but it's a clear recent example. ¹ https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fake-5bf98104cea2 https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa... ² https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-labeled-the https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-lab...
- 0x00000000 4y ago
  4chan does have rules. Low quality posts, spam, racism and nsfw are against the rules on most boards.
- Danin 4y ago
  4chan has rules, albeit incredibly lax and with biased enforcement, but they are enforced (see /bans) eventually. Many of the larger boards seem perpetually and woefully understaffed which gives the impression that it's a lawless website to a casual observer, but depending on the time of day it's likely just the case that there's an insufficient amount of jannies to deal with the volume of posts, with posts being deleted upwards of an hour after being posted. One of the more notable examples of rules being enforced on 4chan was its stance and subsequent banning of anything relating to Gamergate, causing a large part of the community to leave for 8chan. Or more recently the removal of the /qa/ board for cross board raiding.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Make people pay for a subscription and use some of the money to fund moderation?
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Oooh I forgot! The Something Awful forums approach. I think this is the best one.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > 4chan does by having no rules It does have rules. Lots of them. To the point the place changed significantly over the years. You probably mean 8chan which had exactly one rule: don't do anything considered illegal in the USA.
freejazz 4y ago
"You just can't have human moderation at that scale" oh you definitely can. It's just not remotely cost effective and would ruin the bottom line of any tech company.
- kazinator 4y ago
  But the scale may just radically shrink under the new boss.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    By what? all the users leaving?
- Kiro 4y ago
  Naive comment ignoring other obvious problems with human moderation: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/behind-tiktoks-boom-a-legion-of-traumatised-10-a-day-content-moderators https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh...
  - freejazz 4y ago
    I'm not advocating for human moderation so much as pointing out that the profits obtained by these social media organizations that eschew what would be reasonable moderation in any other medium come from their externalization of this cost.
lelanthran 4y ago
> Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules." I want a site where I can see all these screenshots of tweets with Twitters "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules" in the shot. Pair it with another site that has screenshots of tweets that were banned, that obviously don't violate the rules as shown in the first site.
anonymousab 4y ago
> You just can't have human moderation at that scale Effective human moderation - or at least, followup to moderation - should be the necessary cost of scale. If you can't operate at a certain number of users under that constraint then you shouldn't.

Waterluvian 4y ago

That’s awful. And I’ve also witnessed the same kind of abuse that goes ignored. Has any large social media site ever solved this? 4chan does by having no rules: if you show up, expect the absolute worst of humanity. Reddit does by having countless volunteer moderators who basically do 98% of the moderation. Facebook suffers from the same problems as Twitter.

concinds 4y ago
The way I'd solve it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 Basically, more siloed converations would ironically create a better "public town square", because it would reduce the need for moderation and allow freer speech. > That’s awful. And I’ve also witnessed the same kind of abuse that goes ignored. Honestly, it wasn't. Maybe due to my temperament (and I certainly received far less hate than high-profile people do) but I could never empathize with the "online bullying" concerns. It's the nature of the internet, and you just develop the mental strength to tune it out, or use it to your advantage as fuel. Even after those experiences I'd still be much happier with Musk's content policies, or Dorsey'd blockchain-free-for-all with users being able to choose the moderation algorithm they want. I have friends who were suspended for BS reasons and that's a far bigger concern to me.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Hmmm. Would you consider that to be similar to the Reddit model of cloistering themes so that unlike-minded people aren’t artificially pushed together?
  - concinds 4y ago
    The problem is that reddit clusters based on topic, rather than social group. If I'm a bad state actor who wants to influence America on a mass-scale, I buy a bunch of accounts, and buy upvotes, and can shift the hivemind. Or I just infiltrate the mod team. Obviously you'd need to be relatively sophisticated to not get caught. But Twitter is based on social circles, not topics; those concerns don't apply. Instead of having an entire topic/subreddit be biased one way or another, you'd have small friends groups and small communities, that have social dynamics that are as close to real life as possible. Hence all the scale-related problems don't occur. The radicalization rabbit hole? Doesn't happen with siloes. Harassment? There'll be much less with siloes, where someone needs to "add" you (like on Facebook) to interact with you, rather than a drive-by quote-tweet. Ideological censorship? Again, with siloes, there's less need for moderation, so people who aren't harming any others get to communicate with each other. It's more organic. Obviously implementing that isn't as easy, but there's good ideas for clustering in this thread.
    - tqi 4y ago
      TBH I don't think clustering on social groups is the panacea that you hope. Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. We'll never get back to the way things were before the internet became ubiquitous. Back then, we had a limited number of sources, and normal people had very limited reach. But now, it's too easy for individuals to pass information along, and with more sources of it the juiciest / most outrageous information will always go the furthest.
      - concinds 4y ago
        May not be a panacea, but it's the healthiest option. > Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. That's true, but it's relatively easier to solve: really viral messages are a minuscule minority, and can set off internal alerts and be reviewed by humans; to prevent hysteria and murderous rhetoric. And the problem also existed with word-of-mouth, centuries ago, before the masses ever startied reading "the press"; rumors could spread across entire nations. Fake stuff will spread, and people will become more skeptical and adapt, as they did before. Skin in the Game makes a related point.¹ The whole problem with censoring "disinformation" is that it removes society's self-healing mechanisms. Public discourse has always been messy. Louis Farrakhan is labelled hateful, but he ran the Million Man March and is credited getting many African-American men to register to vote. Malcolm X would have been considered an extremist and banned. But it would have been wrong; he may have been flawed on the micro level (that's subjective), but he was beneficial and heroic on the macro level. Censorship has huge second order effects, including self-censorship, introducing status-quo bias. It also promotes conspiratorial thinking, since people who think information is being hidden from them are more likely to seek fringe sources. How do you censor real disinformation, without ending up with things like the Hunter Biden story being censored too? It also allows governments to lie with impunity, because accusations that the government is lying are treated as disinformation, while actual government lies (like the intel agency staffers who said the Hunter laptop was a Russian psyop) are spread everywhere.² People need to be able to spread "conspiracies", since while they may be factually incorrect, they may be directionally correct, while the "official" narrative may be total BS. Note I couldn't care less about Hunter or his laptop, but it's a clear recent example. ¹ https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fake-5bf98104cea2 https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa... ² https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-labeled-the https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-lab...
0x00000000 4y ago
4chan does have rules. Low quality posts, spam, racism and nsfw are against the rules on most boards.
Danin 4y ago
4chan has rules, albeit incredibly lax and with biased enforcement, but they are enforced (see /bans) eventually. Many of the larger boards seem perpetually and woefully understaffed which gives the impression that it's a lawless website to a casual observer, but depending on the time of day it's likely just the case that there's an insufficient amount of jannies to deal with the volume of posts, with posts being deleted upwards of an hour after being posted. One of the more notable examples of rules being enforced on 4chan was its stance and subsequent banning of anything relating to Gamergate, causing a large part of the community to leave for 8chan. Or more recently the removal of the /qa/ board for cross board raiding.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Make people pay for a subscription and use some of the money to fund moderation?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Oooh I forgot! The Something Awful forums approach. I think this is the best one.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> 4chan does by having no rules It does have rules. Lots of them. To the point the place changed significantly over the years. You probably mean 8chan which had exactly one rule: don't do anything considered illegal in the USA.

freejazz 4y ago

"You just can't have human moderation at that scale" oh you definitely can. It's just not remotely cost effective and would ruin the bottom line of any tech company.

kazinator 4y ago
But the scale may just radically shrink under the new boss.
- freejazz 4y ago
  By what? all the users leaving?
Kiro 4y ago
Naive comment ignoring other obvious problems with human moderation: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/behind-tiktoks-boom-a-legion-of-traumatised-10-a-day-content-moderators https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh...
- freejazz 4y ago
  I'm not advocating for human moderation so much as pointing out that the profits obtained by these social media organizations that eschew what would be reasonable moderation in any other medium come from their externalization of this cost.

lelanthran 4y ago

> Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules." I want a site where I can see all these screenshots of tweets with Twitters "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules" in the shot. Pair it with another site that has screenshots of tweets that were banned, that obviously don't violate the rules as shown in the first site.

anonymousab 4y ago

> You just can't have human moderation at that scale Effective human moderation - or at least, followup to moderation - should be the necessary cost of scale. If you can't operate at a certain number of users under that constraint then you shouldn't.