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Twitter fails to act on 99% of Twitter Blue accounts tweeting hate
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- alienasa 3y agoDuh. Twitter is obviously hurting for cash. Blue subscribers are paying them, almost literally for the privilege of doing whatever they want - no incentive to ban/suspend them. Also, there are no moderators anymore.
- dylan604 3y agoat $8/month, it's not like twitter banning these accounts is going to break the bank
- bhaak 3y ago> Twitter is obviously hurting for cash. Because it has to pay $15B of its own takeover price and Elon scared away advertisers. I hope somebody paid Elon handsomely for driving Twitter into the ground. Otherwise he doesn’t look very much like a good businessman.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[flagged]
- cornercasechase 3y ago“Altruistic purposes”, what would those be? I’ve only seen him censor his opponents, spew bog standard far-right talking points and make poor product decisions. How is that “altruistic”?
- antisthenes 3y agoThere's part of me that considers driving the hate machine that is Twitter into the ground and general irrelevance an altruistic purpose. The world would be better off without Twitter, until they can figure out how to separate the hate machine from its useful purposes in a sustainable way.
- xracy 3y agoWhile I appreciate this take as a funny consideration... I feel like it fails the altruism test by not being intentional.
- rsynnott 3y agoFinally destroying the hellsite, for the benefit of all. (As someone who (a) used to enjoy Twitter a lot, (b) always suspected that Twitter was quite bad for society, I have mixed feeling about its current implosion.) (To be clear, he obviously is not destroying Twitter for altruistic purposes; the above is a joke. It should not be necessary to point this out, but one odd attribute of figures like Trump and Musk is that there are always people who insist that everything they do, no matter how obviously ridiculous, is actually intentional and ingenious, so Poe’s Law is in full effect here.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thefz 3y ago> He's the most successful entrepreneur in the world, > doesn't care if he loses money, These two sentences contradict each other.
- runarberg 3y agoNot really, only if we assume the market is rational. I think the fact that Elon Musk it the most successful entrepreneur in the world is a testament to the contrary. And that being a successful businessperson has nothing to do with merit or skill, but a lot more to do with happenstance, and former wealth. Our public policy on the global market has been neo-liberalism on full steam, the rich are getting richer, not because business people are getting smarter, but because government is deregulating exploitation as a matter of public policy. Somebody is bound to become extremely rich in this environment, and it just so happens that the people getting extremely rich are either the ones that exploit workers (i.e. Jeff Bezos) or the ones that fool rich investors (i.e. Elon Musk).
- jsnell 3y agoHe very clearly cares deeply about Twitter losing money. He was desperate to cut costs and increase revenue right from the start. He frequently whines about the cost of running Twitter. He has been stiffing a ton of Twitter's suppliers and not paying the bills. And there's a good reason for this. He is using a his own Tesla shares as collateral for some of the debt.
- bhaak 3y agoSucking up to autocratic rulers while claiming to be a free speech advocate is very altruistic (/s). Saying Twitter was already in the ground and then praising the guy that dug the hole a lot deeper, is also suggesting that your assessment of him is not based on his business acumen. Maybe you're hoping he's pumping your crypto bags? That's one of the things I consider him to be very good at.
- jasmer 3y agoLack of moderation is 10x a worse problem for revenue that offending the blue icons. Moreover, it seems most of the activists don't want to contemplate that bigotry runs in all directions and saying things about 'men' or 'white people' probably should fall under the same auspices ... which is why even as irresponsible and inconsistent as Musk is, he leans a bit more 'loose' than not which is probably preferable than ideological forms of censorship. I also feel that as a society, we're going to get used to 'foul language' and that it just doesn't have the resonance it might have had. Someone spreading fake papers saying 'doctors are trying to kill you with vaccines', with a ton of followers, is actually more problematic than some random dirtbag's side-comment.
- runarberg 3y agoAnecdote to the contrary, I personally got banned from Twitter for answering the question “What do you think about them men?” with “#KillAllMen”. Now this is obviously not a real threat to use violence, but it got me banned nonetheless. To me it seems like Twitter is perfectly happy to moderate against the likes of feminists and LGBTQ+ activists.
- jasmer 3y agoThis example is not going to help your case. The statement 'kill all men' is literally a call to violence. Now of course (probably?) you didn't mean it as that, but it still falls well within purview of 'obviously moderated', probably immediately, by the automated mechanisms, and frankly, how could you expect anything otheriwse? The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'. My god man the lack of self awareness.
- runarberg 3y agoNever claimed I shouldn’t have been banned (and frankly, I’m a little glad I was), just providing an anecdote that “saying things about 'men' or 'white people' does indeed fall under the same auspices” as bigots on the other political wing. Full disclosure though, I do believe moderation should not be applied equally across political the spectrum, when one extreme goes against a protected minority, but I won’t go into further details here on HN, as it would go against the guidelines of not engaging in political battles.
- colesantiago 3y agoIt's Twitter, it's not serious. Pretty much can be kids / teenagers trolling adults. It's not real. https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/285670822264307712 https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/28567082226430771...
- hluska 3y agoAnd that is a serious problem.
- colesantiago 3y agoA serious problem of what? You know you can block people or just log off and move on right? It really is not that serious.
- f6v 3y agoI mean, if someone says a group of people should be killed based on their political stance or sexual orientation that should be a criminal offense. And I might not support all of the groups these days, but I reject blanket statements like “all transgenders are pedophiles”. This is stupid and wrong. And if teenagers are tweeting this, they’re going to end up very stupid adults.
- colesantiago 3y agoThat is their problem and we shouldn't make this our problem. If we are going after Twitter, we should also go after shutting down other internet cesspools like Gab, the chan boards and others. The power I have is logging off and not feeding these trolls, that seemed to work well all the time.
- f6v 3y agoIt’s our problem as a society and more precisely law enforcement problem. If you say that you want to put bullets in someone offline you should be prosecuted. Internet is not different.
- kneebonian 3y ago> Researchers collected tweets promoting hate from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. The tweets were reported to the platform using Twitter’s own tools for flagging hateful conduct. Four days after reporting the tweets, researchers found that Twitter had failed to act on 99% of the posts and 100% of the accounts remained active. In the one instance that Twitter removed a hateful tweet, the account from which it was tweeted remains active. Translation: Some "researchers" flagged a bunch of tweets they didn't like and then got mad when the accounts weren't bad 4 days later. EDIT: Wow the votes on this comment are going "up and down more than an Essex birds underpants" as the BOFH would say. Seems like some people are taking umbridge with my summary.
- sdsd 3y agoI'm really into studying NGO's like this. They are this arm that links the invisible hand of the market to the rest of the body of the state. The substack Fisted by Foucalt also talks a lot about the role of NGO's in color revolutions
- jasmer 3y agoFisted by Foucault is a dark substack, meaning at least partly ideological lies and disinformation. It's a bit like Zero Hedge in that it's one of those places where they like to talk about how the 'World Really Works!' aka 'behind the curtain' and they do so with some actual insight and intelligence, but ultimately there's a lot of BS and lies, and plenty of over misinformation. The author is also a pro-Putin fascist / apologist who thinks that Putin's invasion of Ukraine must somehow be the result of Russia's victimization by other countries.
- fhd2 3y agoThere are various example tweets in the article, quite clearly hateful and some calling for violence. Whether someone likes them seems irrelevant, the tweets are what the article says they are - at least the examples.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoI assume they paid for Blue as transaction to freely tweet hate. Twitter's got its hands tied of its own volition.
- theknocker 3y ago[dead]
- cornercasechase 3y agoIt’s kind of crazy how groupthink all of the blue checkmarks are, it’s like they’re all the same right-wing bot. Hundreds of them complaining day in and day out about trans people and CRT. Each coming to Elon’s defense after every stupid move he makes, saying Musk is for “free speech” every time he censors something. I wonder how many are actually just his sock puppets?
- jeffbee 3y agoIt really is incredible how they are all the same person. And it doesn't even have to be one of those reply threads where all the blue checks are being Very Concerned about trans people or CRT. Just watching them parrot each other's AI boosterism, or crypto, or real estate.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- morkalork 3y agoRanking twitter blue subscriber's replies first is hilariously dumb. Sure, it strokes the ego of the people paying for it so they make some quick money off subscriptions, but damn, it's not doing any favours to the overall quality of the site.
- jeffbee 3y agoActually they rank the gold checks first which leads to the current hilarious practice where people will mention a gold-checked automaton in replies. The robot will also reply, which means your subthread outranks the blue checks. https://twitter.com/krrishd/status/1662264307466350592 https://twitter.com/krrishd/status/1662264307466350592
- rsynnott 3y agoI’m astonished this one ever got past the design stages. Even dating/hookup sites, who pioneered this pay-for-attention mechanic, have long ago realised that it’s a problem, and have largely either abandoned it in favour of other monetisation approaches or rationed it (For instance, Grindr has a feature where you can pay to move to the front of the grid, but only for an hour).
- ETH_start 3y ago[flagged]
- cornercasechase 3y agoWhich of these aren’t hate? “The black culture has done more damage [than] the klan ever did” “The Jewish Mafia wants to replace us all with brown people” “Trannies are pedophiles” “Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide” “Hitler was right”, accompanied by a montage of the former dictator Black people belong “locked in cages at the zoo” LGBTQ+ rights activists need “IRON IN THEIR DIET. Preferably from a #AFiringSquad”
- ETH_start 3y ago[flagged]
- xracy 3y agoI think what you're describing for "something a racist would very likely say" is called a "Dogwhistle" and the reason it is hateful is that it's absolutely trying to set the bar for what they can get away with saying that's terrible without overstepping the line of what is going to get removed. People understand the basic conceits of public politeness, so racists know they have to put in the smallest amount of work to let other people cover for them. These have not even really met that bar... But it's worth considering how much of this you would accept from say... known klan members? Like, I get that if hate groups say it, it's not inherently hate speech, but at what point do you want to be defending hate groups? I don't feel like I need to get real in the weeds about how what the limit of shit I will put up with from KKK members is... And I think it's disingenuous to suggest we should really get deep in the weeds to iron out exactly how they can walk around the rules. We know who the rulebreakers are, and pretending like we don't until they say something truly egregious is like pretending leopards aren't gonna eat our faces.
- ETH_start 3y ago[flagged]
- thriftwy 3y ago[flagged]
- version_five 3y agoIf the examples they used of "hate" are the worst they can find, I actually think that we've struck a pretty good balance.
- f6v 3y agoI mean, it’s still pretty bad and these accounts(in the examples) should be banned and owners prosecuted if applicable.
- josephcsible 3y ago> owners prosecuted The First Amendment applies to offensive speech too.
- Zigurd 3y agoAnd it does not apply to private fora. If you own a bar and fire the bouncer and Nazis cook meth in your back room and no normies come drink there anymore, don't blame the 1A.
- xracy 3y agoI assume some of this is balanced for not having to read the truly vitriolic stuff on there... That said "Hitler was right" posts are a good balance to strike? That's someone saying that mass genocide is okay... That's concerning to me.
- f6v 3y agoI bet what the censorship zealots would like to see is that twitter removes much more subtle posts that the examples in the article. What can pass for “hate speech” will raise your eyebrows.
- version_five 3y agoThat's the problem. Decide some amorphous term like "hate" is not allowed, and the the goalposts shift to framing how everything you don't like is "hate". Local laws vary, and I believe some commonwealth countries have pretty draconian ones, but outside direct calls for physical violence, I think it's an immediate slippery slope to telling people they can't say categories of things. If the kind of comments here are the worst that result, I don't think that's really a problem.
- cornercasechase 3y agoWhich of these is “subtle”? From the article: “The black culture has done more damage [than] the klan ever did” “The Jewish Mafia wants to replace us all with brown people” “Trannies are pedophiles” “Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide” “Hitler was right”, accompanied by a montage of the former dictator Black people belong “locked in cages at the zoo” LGBTQ+ rights activists need “IRON IN THEIR DIET. Preferably from a #AFiringSquad”
- version_five 3y agoThat's not the right framing. What are the specific things about any of those that warrant infringing someone's free speech rights? I mean you posted them twice in this discussion so apparently are ok with people reading them.
- cornercasechase 3y agoI quoted them twice because two (now three) people in this thread said the tweets weren’t that bad, so people should see for themselves exactly what these users are endorsing.
- 3y ago
- ftyers 3y ago[flagged]
- bhaak 3y agoYou can install the "Blue Blocker" extension. That will block all Blue checkmark users you are not already following. Hacky workaround until Twitter gets better or shuts down.
- bluefishinit 3y agoI did this as it's the only way to make the site even barely usable. Then I asked myself, why even bother? Why give Musk traffic? I don't use Twitter anymore (after 10+ years) and can't say I miss it at all.
- bhaak 3y agoI think it depends on how you build up your bubble. I am also a 10+ Twitter user and I had a pretty drama free and informative timeline. Whereas for some people it has always been a cesspool. Sure my timeline got worse in the last year but I am still following valuable accounts that I'm not ready to give up yet. If it makes you feel any better Elon claimed that large block lists make Twitter lose money. But the last 10 years certainly taught me that "how could they allow this and didn't see it coming and did something against it?" has a much more nuanced answer than I would have thought earlier.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- brucethemoose2 3y agoNothing in this thread or on Twitter makes me want to use Twitter.