6 ms·

Twitter's copyright strike system is no longer working

89 points by ahiknsr 4y ago

sschueller 4y ago
Must have been one of those useless 80% micro services. /s Doesn't this have legal ramifications? I was pretty sure that studios etc. have contracts with companies like Twitter where Twitter guarantees some sort of effort to prevent copyrighted movies being uploaded in exchange of not being taken to court and held accountable.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  If you read further down it says that Twitter staff would need to respond to individual DMCA complaints if they didn't have this system.
- toss1 4y ago
  There's a whole lotta comments on that thread about angering The Mouse, one pointing out that 'Musk thinks he's hardcore? He hasn't yet dealt with the angry Mouse'. And, downchain, there's a tweet posting the first 2:30 of Avatar (Disney), and many mentions of a bunch of the Fast & Furious films (Universal) posted in their entirety in 2:30 long clips. Monday 10 AM will be interesting for the Twitter legal team. Oh, right, seems they were mostly fired . . .
matthewdgreen 4y ago
On the one hand, I'm happy to see copyright systems breaking down! On the other: I sure hope those moderators and systems are down because they're currently being re-tasked with taking down child abuse media (and not, say, just completely shut down due to massive layoffs), otherwise that site is about to become horrifying.
- robd003 4y ago
  They've been on a tear getting rid of pedos since Elon took over; https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-taking-child-exploitation-seriously/ https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-taking-child-exploitation-...
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    I'm pretty pessimistic, given that they've cut their moderation teams so close to the bone. Asia-Pacific in particular has gone to near-zero, and that's an enormous source of CSE content. It's hard to believe that Twitter will really have much capability to handle this content (let alone responding to police reports about it) unless they do something to build this capability back up. On the other hand they chopped out some low-hanging fruit by removing hashtags and getting a burst of good PR, which seems good but probably not sustainable. Seems like in the scheme of things the loss of moderation capability is the real story here, but I guess we can always be hopeful that the reality will match the short-term PR.
  - pannSun 4y ago
    How little outrage known sellers of child porn garnered previously, compared to the reaction to the brief impersonation of blue checkmarks under Musk. It almost makes one question the objectivity of the ruling media elite, when they inflate or diminish things so arbitrarily.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      This seems like the kind of argument one invents when one has an axe to grind. Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it. I'm sure you didn't spend 50% of your time being angry about CSE moderation on Instagram last week, that doesn't mean all your other opinions are invalid.
      - pannSun 4y ago
        > This seems like the kind of argument one invents when one has an axe to grind. You could aim this statement at media selective outrage too, and you'd be much more correct. > Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it. Yet there wasn't a lot of controversy about Twitter ignoring it. To such an extent that, in your own words, they left even low-hanging fruit unpicked.
    - deleted 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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c7b 4y ago
This one is down, but there are plenty more movies linked just in the thread below that are still working at the time of writing. If this is indeed related to the layoffs (very conceivably so), this could easily spiral to a point where the objectively best option (financially, legally) for Musk would be to take the site offline asap.
- racktash 4y ago
  If it actually came to that, he could just disable the videos/media feature. I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course. (The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    I agree, I think it’s way too early to tell. It’s also interesting that pre-acquisition, I personally observed a widely shared sentiment that 7500 employees was an absurdly high number given the actual functionality of Twitter. “What do they all do?”
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    > I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens Personally I don't claim to have any strong predictions, but find it fun to think about the most entertaining scenarios.
  - c7b 4y ago
    Sure, there is some element of disaster voyeurism to observing Twitter right now, and a lot of people surely do have vested interests (for any other medium, Twitter is a competitor for ad revenue, tech employees might be concerned that the layoffs might serve as an example,...) - but that concern was genuine as far as I can say. It's not my base case, but it is something I'd be concerned about if I was one of Musk's co-investors. Disabling media wouldn't tackle nearly all the problems that a broken monitoring system could create, but you're right that it might demonstrate enough effort so that it's legally sane to keep the site up until you can fix it.
helf 4y ago
Quick! Start posting Z-libraries entire 31TB compressed archive!
nells 4y ago
Where’s the proof that this automatic system ever existed before? I could upload a picture of a horse and say that since my account wasn’t taken down the antihorse system is malfunctioning.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
So entertaining - genius Musk.
solardev 4y ago
Twitter can't die soon enough. If Musk ends up completely destroying it, that's probably the best thing he can do for humanity.
- memish 4y ago
  Either destroy it or improve it in a materially important way. Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity." https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656
  - toss1 4y ago
    Hmmm. Nate Silver got completely suckered by the R operation to flood the zone with RW-biased polls, predicting the "red wave" that never happened. He stated before the election that 'the averages would look more blue if they were based on the long-standing polling orgs', but made no appropriate weighting adjustment. Afterwards, he blamed his failure on the Dems not running a similar bogus operation to bias the averages & narrative. He got pretty roasted on Twitter for both. So no surprise that he would want to avoid the "hall monitor types".
    - lupire 4y ago
      The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions. But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
      - toss1 4y ago
        Spot on. Insufficient skepticism. We can hope he'll learn the lesson and apply more of it next time around.
      - 4y ago
nelsonenzo 4y ago
I have no choice but to short Tesla stock, no matter how much I like the technology or company. Elon's 30B stake he put up to buy Twitter will have to be sold when the Twitter revenue dries up - and with advertisers and big names leaving that path is inevitable. He really doesn't realize that once you lose market penetration, your done forever no matter how nice you make it. Myspace taught us that. They had a beautiful revamp once upon a time, but it was too late. Facebook ate it's lunch. Same will happen here, only worse.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > I have no choice but to short Tesla stock How do you short a private company?
  - plandis 4y ago
    TSLA is publicly traded though?
    - CogitoCogito 4y ago
      Sorry brain must not be functioning. I read that a couple times as Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- toss1 4y ago
  Excellent point, but how likely is a good outcome from this trade? Assume that Twitter is 90% likely to tank at least badly enough that he has to cover the loans, and that $30B is entirely collateralized with TSLA stock (vs Twitter or some other assets). That $30B is about 5.7% of the $527b market cap. Selling it all at once would certainly depress the stock. But would he have to do that, or just dump enough each month to make the payments? If that's over something like 5-10 years. it'd somewhat depress the curve, but enough to make a short work? If it's a 10-year timespan, it's more like 0.6% per year of 'extra' sales from the event, which seems getting down in the noise. Seems he's also make a variety of moves, e.g. a rollover loan, stock buybacks, etc. to minimize the impact on TSLA price... What am I missing here?

89 points by ahiknsr 4y ago

Must have been one of those useless 80% micro services. /s Doesn't this have legal ramifications? I was pretty sure that studios etc. have contracts with companies like Twitter where Twitter guarantees some sort of effort to prevent copyrighted movies being uploaded in exchange of not being taken to court and held accountable.

tjpnz 4y ago
If you read further down it says that Twitter staff would need to respond to individual DMCA complaints if they didn't have this system.
toss1 4y ago
There's a whole lotta comments on that thread about angering The Mouse, one pointing out that 'Musk thinks he's hardcore? He hasn't yet dealt with the angry Mouse'. And, downchain, there's a tweet posting the first 2:30 of Avatar (Disney), and many mentions of a bunch of the Fast & Furious films (Universal) posted in their entirety in 2:30 long clips. Monday 10 AM will be interesting for the Twitter legal team. Oh, right, seems they were mostly fired . . .

matthewdgreen 4y ago

On the one hand, I'm happy to see copyright systems breaking down! On the other: I sure hope those moderators and systems are down because they're currently being re-tasked with taking down child abuse media (and not, say, just completely shut down due to massive layoffs), otherwise that site is about to become horrifying.

robd003 4y ago
They've been on a tear getting rid of pedos since Elon took over; https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-taking-child-exploitation-seriously/ https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-taking-child-exploitation-...
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I'm pretty pessimistic, given that they've cut their moderation teams so close to the bone. Asia-Pacific in particular has gone to near-zero, and that's an enormous source of CSE content. It's hard to believe that Twitter will really have much capability to handle this content (let alone responding to police reports about it) unless they do something to build this capability back up. On the other hand they chopped out some low-hanging fruit by removing hashtags and getting a burst of good PR, which seems good but probably not sustainable. Seems like in the scheme of things the loss of moderation capability is the real story here, but I guess we can always be hopeful that the reality will match the short-term PR.
- pannSun 4y ago
  How little outrage known sellers of child porn garnered previously, compared to the reaction to the brief impersonation of blue checkmarks under Musk. It almost makes one question the objectivity of the ruling media elite, when they inflate or diminish things so arbitrarily.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    This seems like the kind of argument one invents when one has an axe to grind. Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it. I'm sure you didn't spend 50% of your time being angry about CSE moderation on Instagram last week, that doesn't mean all your other opinions are invalid.
    - pannSun 4y ago
      > This seems like the kind of argument one invents when one has an axe to grind. You could aim this statement at media selective outrage too, and you'd be much more correct. > Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it. Yet there wasn't a lot of controversy about Twitter ignoring it. To such an extent that, in your own words, they left even low-hanging fruit unpicked.
  - deleted 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

c7b 4y ago

This one is down, but there are plenty more movies linked just in the thread below that are still working at the time of writing. If this is indeed related to the layoffs (very conceivably so), this could easily spiral to a point where the objectively best option (financially, legally) for Musk would be to take the site offline asap.

racktash 4y ago
If it actually came to that, he could just disable the videos/media feature. I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course. (The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  I agree, I think it’s way too early to tell. It’s also interesting that pre-acquisition, I personally observed a widely shared sentiment that 7500 employees was an absurdly high number given the actual functionality of Twitter. “What do they all do?”
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens Personally I don't claim to have any strong predictions, but find it fun to think about the most entertaining scenarios.
- c7b 4y ago
  Sure, there is some element of disaster voyeurism to observing Twitter right now, and a lot of people surely do have vested interests (for any other medium, Twitter is a competitor for ad revenue, tech employees might be concerned that the layoffs might serve as an example,...) - but that concern was genuine as far as I can say. It's not my base case, but it is something I'd be concerned about if I was one of Musk's co-investors. Disabling media wouldn't tackle nearly all the problems that a broken monitoring system could create, but you're right that it might demonstrate enough effort so that it's legally sane to keep the site up until you can fix it.

helf 4y ago

Quick! Start posting Z-libraries entire 31TB compressed archive!

nells 4y ago

Where’s the proof that this automatic system ever existed before? I could upload a picture of a horse and say that since my account wasn’t taken down the antihorse system is malfunctioning.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

So entertaining - genius Musk.

solardev 4y ago

Twitter can't die soon enough. If Musk ends up completely destroying it, that's probably the best thing he can do for humanity.

memish 4y ago
Either destroy it or improve it in a materially important way. Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity." https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656
- toss1 4y ago
  Hmmm. Nate Silver got completely suckered by the R operation to flood the zone with RW-biased polls, predicting the "red wave" that never happened. He stated before the election that 'the averages would look more blue if they were based on the long-standing polling orgs', but made no appropriate weighting adjustment. Afterwards, he blamed his failure on the Dems not running a similar bogus operation to bias the averages & narrative. He got pretty roasted on Twitter for both. So no surprise that he would want to avoid the "hall monitor types".
  - lupire 4y ago
    The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions. But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
    - toss1 4y ago
      Spot on. Insufficient skepticism. We can hope he'll learn the lesson and apply more of it next time around.
    - 4y ago

nelsonenzo 4y ago

I have no choice but to short Tesla stock, no matter how much I like the technology or company. Elon's 30B stake he put up to buy Twitter will have to be sold when the Twitter revenue dries up - and with advertisers and big names leaving that path is inevitable. He really doesn't realize that once you lose market penetration, your done forever no matter how nice you make it. Myspace taught us that. They had a beautiful revamp once upon a time, but it was too late. Facebook ate it's lunch. Same will happen here, only worse.

CogitoCogito 4y ago
> I have no choice but to short Tesla stock How do you short a private company?
- plandis 4y ago
  TSLA is publicly traded though?
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    Sorry brain must not be functioning. I read that a couple times as Twitter.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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toss1 4y ago
Excellent point, but how likely is a good outcome from this trade? Assume that Twitter is 90% likely to tank at least badly enough that he has to cover the loans, and that $30B is entirely collateralized with TSLA stock (vs Twitter or some other assets). That $30B is about 5.7% of the $527b market cap. Selling it all at once would certainly depress the stock. But would he have to do that, or just dump enough each month to make the payments? If that's over something like 5-10 years. it'd somewhat depress the curve, but enough to make a short work? If it's a 10-year timespan, it's more like 0.6% per year of 'extra' sales from the event, which seems getting down in the noise. Seems he's also make a variety of moves, e.g. a rollover loan, stock buybacks, etc. to minimize the impact on TSLA price... What am I missing here?