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Anyone who is interested should also read https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976869460275201 https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976869460275201 for a

by btilly 4y ago

Anyone who is interested should also read https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976869460275201 https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976869460275201 for a rather different take. It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine, and PENALIZES people who attempt to interact with those outside of their general political circle. I can give arguments for why they should do both, but I think both are ultimately bad ideas.

simplotek 4y ago
> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine, and PENALIZES people who attempt to interact with those outside of their general political circle. While Musk's Twitter explicitly censors references to Russia's genocide of Ukraine, Musk himself feigns ignorance and false indignation accusing the "western press" of insisting "on pushing such a lopsided view of the conflict". https://twitter.com/VsimPohuy/status/1645699649003569152?t=vItf8RIKBAGILEVtIQe2sw&s=19 https://twitter.com/VsimPohuy/status/1645699649003569152?t=v...
- lumb63 4y ago
  The two ideas aren’t necessarily in conflict with one another. In fact, they make sense to go hand-in-hand. Take for instance affirmative action or reparations. They’re instances of trying to correct for something that’s the opposite of how the group desires it, by doing the opposite of what supporters claim is being done to the marginalized group.
  - NicoJuicy 4y ago
    The "marginalized group" in this case are the ones that invaded a country and are killing innocent civilians for natural resources.
    - proudeu 4y ago
      [flagged]
hathawsh 4y ago
From your link (thanks!): > 9. Making up words or misspelling hurts > Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty. Does that mean if I tweet about coding and use identifiers like "setUserName", which is not an English word, the tweet gets a huge penalty? If so, that's disappointing.
- strken 4y ago
  That jumped out at me as a possible misreading of the code. Is it detecting the language of the whole tweet, or just a word as the author claims? Demoting a tweet that's entirely unidentifiable as any human language seems fair enough.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Man if someone asked me to build a system to merely identify whether a unicode string is human language or not I would flatly refuse. There are thousands of spoken languages, many of them with no standard written form, some that are transcribed into multiple different writing systems, some with no writing tradition at all and with only ad-hoc transliteration unique to each user and use. Even being 90% confident would be a massive undertaking, and "speakers of this language may/may not use the internet" feels like high stakes for getting it wrong. It seems a little niche but I'm sure a few times a year some far out town gets connected and suddenly there are speakers of a previously unknown-to-the-internet language newly online.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      Note that the metric here is "is the tweet in one of the languages spoken by the user". This hypothetically allows more nuanced implementations than you contemplate. For example, they could have a language "unrecognized" and assume everyone speaks it. I broadly find this useful: I see tweets in other languages when they're retweeted by people I follow, and about half the time I machine translate them. But I don't want my whole feed to be that.
    - thrashh 4y ago
randomwalker 4y ago
OP here. Unfortunately this thread is mostly misinformation. There were a bunch of viral threads from the growth hacker / influencer crowd, including this one, within hours of the code release with a very superficial understanding of the code (and how recsys work in general). That's partly what motivated me to write this article. See here for a rebuttal of the main tweet in that thread (near the bottom of the article). https://solomonmg.github.io/post/twitter-the-algorithm/ https://solomonmg.github.io/post/twitter-the-algorithm/
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  If this is for their Crisis Misinformation Policy why only one specific callout and specifically directed to Ukraine? Seems like a generous assumptions to make on your part that it's a nothing burger. The takeaway we should go with is that we now know that internally they are willing to programatically segment out Ukraine related topics. The question to me that this new knowledge should lead to is why a policy to segmenting this? (not to call immediately jump to 'nothing burger' or as you put it in the above post 'misinformation').
simonw 4y ago
I was not at all impressed with the analysis in that thread. It makes a bunch of assumptions that don't feel very thorough to me, but announces them as if they are unimpeachable facts. Biggest example is this one: "9. Making up words or misspelling hurts - Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty." The code in the screenshot for that looks like this: // Boost (demotion) if the tweet language is not one of user's // understandable languages, nor interface language. optional double unknownLanguageBoost = 0.01 That doesn't match the description of "Making up words or misspelling hurts" at all!
- LegitShady 4y ago
  input youtube thumbnail of cat in the hat enraged "DR SUESS CANCELLED?! TWITTER WON'T COMMENT!" ragebait youtuber.
- treis 4y ago
  The systemic racism people are going to go wild about this
  - numeri 4y ago
    I agree with you (although I think one should be upset about this, and you seemed to imply that you disagree with the "systemic racism people"). This would directly penalize endangered languages and dialects, which is a tragic loss for linguistic diversity. I think a lot of people hoped the WWW would connect these small and dwindling communities, and even help revitalize them, but policies like this sound actively harmful. If we're looking at it through the lens of systemic racism, it seems pretty straightforward as well – anyone who speaks a non-standard variant or dialect of their language will have less power to share their thoughts and ideas. They will also see less other people doing so, creating a feedback-loop discouraging the use of non-standard language.
    - sieabahlpark 4y ago
      [dead]
wunderland 4y ago
It’s unclear if it penalizes discussion of Ukraine equally though. There have been many stories that have come to light in the last few months. Merkel and Macron admitting the Minsk agreements were used to buy time for CIA and British to arm rebels since 2014 was big story. Large amounts of money the US has supplied Ukraine and lack of oversight to where this is going (the total US aid now surpasses Russia’s entire military budget per year). But this same poster (aakashg0) claims these stories have been suppressed, even though they would be counter to dominant narrative in western media. I think algorithmic moderation on a particular topic is hard; you still need someone in there boosting the stories you want people to read and downplaying the stories you don’t.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Tell us more, who are the "rebels" in this story and what arms did Merkel send? (Is this what news in the PRC feel like?)
  - wunderland 4y ago
    The rebels are right-wing paramilitary groups. And Germany didn’t send any weapons during 2014-2022, but she said in a Der Spiegel interview from Oct 2022 that during the Minsk negotiations, it became clear that the US’ objective was to buy time to secretly arm Ukraine (which is newsworthy because this would imply a violation of the Minsk agreement).
    - stefan_ 4y ago
      So in a year the US has sent more than Russia's yearly defence budget, yet Minsk (which one, even?) was needed to secretly (what was secret?) arm the Ukraine over 8 years? Who are the "right-wing paramilitary groups" and if they are Ukraine, since this is who you are alleging is being armed, why are they rebels if they are government-aligned?
      - wunderland 4y ago
        This is all very easy stuff for you to verify for yourself and wasn’t the original point of my top comment (which was that these stories are hard to suppress without manual effort— although apparently many Americans are unaware). But to be clear, the US was funding Ukrainian rebel groups (right-wing paramilitary organizations) 2014-2022 but through clandestine means. This is much more difficult to do without the support of congress because the support has to be indirect — the funding has to be off-the-books — because this was a violation of the Minsk agreement. Since 2022, the floodgates have opened and the US is now openly sending money and weapons systems, now totaling over $100B since the Russian invasion. The Russian Defence budget is estimated to be $70-80B per year.
XorNot 4y ago
This is an example of "a lie can get half way around the world before the truth gets its pants on". I'm no fan of Musk these days, but there is plainly no evidence in the repo that Ukraine is being suppressed - the linked code is very obviously a model dispatch from an initial classification system, and it makes perfect sense Ukraine would need a call out there since a major war most likely would normally run afoul of profanity, violence, and calls to violence filters without actually violating them.
paganel 4y ago
> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine Because of stuff like the NAFO trolls I can understand why that discussion is not brought to the top anymore. Anyway, whoever is interested in the war going down there can most definitely have access to both sides' views, I personally find Twitter one of the few media/online outlets that still makes that possible (and props to them for that).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boringuser2 4y ago
That's a great way to eliminate misinformation, I don't really see the problem.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine What makes you say this? I’m aware tweets about Ukraine are down ranked. This seems analogous to subreddits (such as world news, geopolitics, etc) stickying a live thread for the war. This is to prevent it from taking over the subreddit and it happens to slow down discussion. Seems like the Ukraine war topic is similarly tuned on Twitter. Ukraine can still trend it just takes more activity than other topics.
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  This is exactly what "trying not to discuss Ukraine" is. Without outright banning it. When subreddits create a mandatory megathread, it is always with the purpose of kneecapping that specific topic. Putting a large topic into a single thread makes sharing information about the topic extremely difficult. I'd like to add that there's no reason to believe that such topics that get buried into megathreads would have taken over a subreddit otherwise. The news cycle turns. For example, worldnews today would look no different if the Ukraine war topic had been allowed to breathe. At most it would have caused the minor inconvenience of going to page two for the fraction of people not interested at all in the Ukraine war at that time.

by btilly 4y ago

simplotek 4y ago

> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine, and PENALIZES people who attempt to interact with those outside of their general political circle. While Musk's Twitter explicitly censors references to Russia's genocide of Ukraine, Musk himself feigns ignorance and false indignation accusing the "western press" of insisting "on pushing such a lopsided view of the conflict". https://twitter.com/VsimPohuy/status/1645699649003569152?t=vItf8RIKBAGILEVtIQe2sw&s=19 https://twitter.com/VsimPohuy/status/1645699649003569152?t=v...

lumb63 4y ago
The two ideas aren’t necessarily in conflict with one another. In fact, they make sense to go hand-in-hand. Take for instance affirmative action or reparations. They’re instances of trying to correct for something that’s the opposite of how the group desires it, by doing the opposite of what supporters claim is being done to the marginalized group.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  The "marginalized group" in this case are the ones that invaded a country and are killing innocent civilians for natural resources.
  - proudeu 4y ago
    [flagged]

hathawsh 4y ago

From your link (thanks!): > 9. Making up words or misspelling hurts > Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty. Does that mean if I tweet about coding and use identifiers like "setUserName", which is not an English word, the tweet gets a huge penalty? If so, that's disappointing.

strken 4y ago
That jumped out at me as a possible misreading of the code. Is it detecting the language of the whole tweet, or just a word as the author claims? Demoting a tweet that's entirely unidentifiable as any human language seems fair enough.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Man if someone asked me to build a system to merely identify whether a unicode string is human language or not I would flatly refuse. There are thousands of spoken languages, many of them with no standard written form, some that are transcribed into multiple different writing systems, some with no writing tradition at all and with only ad-hoc transliteration unique to each user and use. Even being 90% confident would be a massive undertaking, and "speakers of this language may/may not use the internet" feels like high stakes for getting it wrong. It seems a little niche but I'm sure a few times a year some far out town gets connected and suddenly there are speakers of a previously unknown-to-the-internet language newly online.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    Note that the metric here is "is the tweet in one of the languages spoken by the user". This hypothetically allows more nuanced implementations than you contemplate. For example, they could have a language "unrecognized" and assume everyone speaks it. I broadly find this useful: I see tweets in other languages when they're retweeted by people I follow, and about half the time I machine translate them. But I don't want my whole feed to be that.
  - thrashh 4y ago

randomwalker 4y ago

OP here. Unfortunately this thread is mostly misinformation. There were a bunch of viral threads from the growth hacker / influencer crowd, including this one, within hours of the code release with a very superficial understanding of the code (and how recsys work in general). That's partly what motivated me to write this article. See here for a rebuttal of the main tweet in that thread (near the bottom of the article). https://solomonmg.github.io/post/twitter-the-algorithm/ https://solomonmg.github.io/post/twitter-the-algorithm/

ROTMetro 4y ago
If this is for their Crisis Misinformation Policy why only one specific callout and specifically directed to Ukraine? Seems like a generous assumptions to make on your part that it's a nothing burger. The takeaway we should go with is that we now know that internally they are willing to programatically segment out Ukraine related topics. The question to me that this new knowledge should lead to is why a policy to segmenting this? (not to call immediately jump to 'nothing burger' or as you put it in the above post 'misinformation').

simonw 4y ago

I was not at all impressed with the analysis in that thread. It makes a bunch of assumptions that don't feel very thorough to me, but announces them as if they are unimpeachable facts. Biggest example is this one: "9. Making up words or misspelling hurts - Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty." The code in the screenshot for that looks like this: // Boost (demotion) if the tweet language is not one of user's // understandable languages, nor interface language. optional double unknownLanguageBoost = 0.01 That doesn't match the description of "Making up words or misspelling hurts" at all!

LegitShady 4y ago
input youtube thumbnail of cat in the hat enraged "DR SUESS CANCELLED?! TWITTER WON'T COMMENT!" ragebait youtuber.
treis 4y ago
The systemic racism people are going to go wild about this
- numeri 4y ago
  I agree with you (although I think one should be upset about this, and you seemed to imply that you disagree with the "systemic racism people"). This would directly penalize endangered languages and dialects, which is a tragic loss for linguistic diversity. I think a lot of people hoped the WWW would connect these small and dwindling communities, and even help revitalize them, but policies like this sound actively harmful. If we're looking at it through the lens of systemic racism, it seems pretty straightforward as well – anyone who speaks a non-standard variant or dialect of their language will have less power to share their thoughts and ideas. They will also see less other people doing so, creating a feedback-loop discouraging the use of non-standard language.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
    [dead]

wunderland 4y ago

It’s unclear if it penalizes discussion of Ukraine equally though. There have been many stories that have come to light in the last few months. Merkel and Macron admitting the Minsk agreements were used to buy time for CIA and British to arm rebels since 2014 was big story. Large amounts of money the US has supplied Ukraine and lack of oversight to where this is going (the total US aid now surpasses Russia’s entire military budget per year). But this same poster (aakashg0) claims these stories have been suppressed, even though they would be counter to dominant narrative in western media. I think algorithmic moderation on a particular topic is hard; you still need someone in there boosting the stories you want people to read and downplaying the stories you don’t.

stefan_ 4y ago
Tell us more, who are the "rebels" in this story and what arms did Merkel send? (Is this what news in the PRC feel like?)
- wunderland 4y ago
  The rebels are right-wing paramilitary groups. And Germany didn’t send any weapons during 2014-2022, but she said in a Der Spiegel interview from Oct 2022 that during the Minsk negotiations, it became clear that the US’ objective was to buy time to secretly arm Ukraine (which is newsworthy because this would imply a violation of the Minsk agreement).
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    So in a year the US has sent more than Russia's yearly defence budget, yet Minsk (which one, even?) was needed to secretly (what was secret?) arm the Ukraine over 8 years? Who are the "right-wing paramilitary groups" and if they are Ukraine, since this is who you are alleging is being armed, why are they rebels if they are government-aligned?
    - wunderland 4y ago
      This is all very easy stuff for you to verify for yourself and wasn’t the original point of my top comment (which was that these stories are hard to suppress without manual effort— although apparently many Americans are unaware). But to be clear, the US was funding Ukrainian rebel groups (right-wing paramilitary organizations) 2014-2022 but through clandestine means. This is much more difficult to do without the support of congress because the support has to be indirect — the funding has to be off-the-books — because this was a violation of the Minsk agreement. Since 2022, the floodgates have opened and the US is now openly sending money and weapons systems, now totaling over $100B since the Russian invasion. The Russian Defence budget is estimated to be $70-80B per year.

XorNot 4y ago

This is an example of "a lie can get half way around the world before the truth gets its pants on". I'm no fan of Musk these days, but there is plainly no evidence in the repo that Ukraine is being suppressed - the linked code is very obviously a model dispatch from an initial classification system, and it makes perfect sense Ukraine would need a call out there since a major war most likely would normally run afoul of profanity, violence, and calls to violence filters without actually violating them.

paganel 4y ago

> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine Because of stuff like the NAFO trolls I can understand why that discussion is not brought to the top anymore. Anyway, whoever is interested in the war going down there can most definitely have access to both sides' views, I personally find Twitter one of the few media/online outlets that still makes that possible (and props to them for that).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

boringuser2 4y ago

That's a great way to eliminate misinformation, I don't really see the problem.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> It particularly interested me that Twitter under Musk is trying NOT to discuss Ukraine What makes you say this? I’m aware tweets about Ukraine are down ranked. This seems analogous to subreddits (such as world news, geopolitics, etc) stickying a live thread for the war. This is to prevent it from taking over the subreddit and it happens to slow down discussion. Seems like the Ukraine war topic is similarly tuned on Twitter. Ukraine can still trend it just takes more activity than other topics.

cultureswitch 4y ago
This is exactly what "trying not to discuss Ukraine" is. Without outright banning it. When subreddits create a mandatory megathread, it is always with the purpose of kneecapping that specific topic. Putting a large topic into a single thread makes sharing information about the topic extremely difficult. I'd like to add that there's no reason to believe that such topics that get buried into megathreads would have taken over a subreddit otherwise. The news cycle turns. For example, worldnews today would look no different if the Ukraine war topic had been allowed to breathe. At most it would have caused the minor inconvenience of going to page two for the fraction of people not interested at all in the Ukraine war at that time.