United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Acting General Counsel

Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by microcolonel on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:25PM (#15612923)

As a Twitter lover, it's been a real letdown to see them sacrifice objectivity and fairness at the altar of political correctness. The platform is so seriously broken by their attempts to censor things they deem unpleasant. I have tried my best to turn off all of their content filtering features, but they still sometimes censor replies to my own replies. You can sometimes see the actual number of replies to a tweet next to the reply button, but can not actually see them at all.

At the same time, they have not done anything to reduce certain types of spam, such as the repeated reply chains under the President's tweets, which can so easily be identified as spam by the fact that they are unrelated to the parent, and appear in the same order under a number of parent tweets.

It's a total mess.

Added: I went back to find an example of the spam chains to reply to Srslyjosh, but I'm pleasantly surprised that they seem to have finally eliminated them. I withdraw that specific criticism I guess.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by ivraatiems on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:58PM (#15613237)

This isn't about the right-wing dogwhistle of "political correctness" at all. It's about not letting networks of fake users (bots and/or individuals claiming to be someone they aren't) spread false information with no input from real people. There are plenty of real, unrestricted "politically incorrect" people on Twitter right now. The difference - as it pertains to this discussion - is that they are real people, not robot armies paid for by foreign adversaries.

Yes, some of them have been banned, and sometimes the reasons for those bans are dubious because Twitter does not consistently enforce their policies. But that is a separate issue from what's under discussion here.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by adrxyz on Thursday November 02, 2017 @07:20PM (#15615279)

Never have I heard the expression "dog whistle" more than in the last two years, always regarding politics, and always from liberals chastising conservatives. It's like their "in group" slang.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by ivraatiems on Friday November 03, 2017 @09:10AM (#15618886)

Sure, I'm a liberal and I agree. What's your point?

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by creaghpatr on Thursday November 02, 2017 @03:28PM (#15613470)

enforcement consistency is the point of the discussion, otherwise Twitter can proactively or retroactively label anything 'spam' without describing how they [or their algorithm] arrived at that conclusion.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by fhood on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:31PM (#15612988)

They did not suppress those tags because of "political correctness" but rather used those as an example of tags associated with unusually high levels of spam.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by megaman22 on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:39PM (#15613067)

It does raise an interesting idea... If you want to suppress and discredit something, just spin up a pile of bots to heavily promote that which you want to censor. Bonus points if you route it through VPNs in Russia or China or North Korea.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by creaghpatr on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:49PM (#15613153)

It was alleged that bot nets would try and dilute politically motivated trends by blasting out a hashtag that was one letter off- for example #podasta instead of #podesta.

Then 'real' users who started typing would autofill with the false one and the topic would lose steam quicker. Of course, without knowing Twitters proprietary algorithms, this is all just anecdotal.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by ch4s3 on Thursday November 02, 2017 @04:05PM (#15613755)

I'm not sure that invalidates the reasoning behind nuking hashtags driven by bot farms, which is clearly a practice that negatively impacts the practice. What you're describing sounds like a case for better discerning between bots and real users.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by bookmarkacc on Thursday November 02, 2017 @08:43PM (#15615783)

Depends if the spam was used to initially seed the hashtag or if it comes in after genuine discussion between real people.

To me it seems like two different cases that are easy to distinguish.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by sctb on Thursday November 02, 2017 @03:30PM (#15613487)

Boy we got here quickly. Could you please take a look at the guidelines, which ask us not to post like this?

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by Helloworldboy on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#15613208)

"if you don't censor people, you're a nazi!!!!!"

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by microcolonel on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:44PM (#15613110)

If you think it stops there, or even achieves that goal, you haven't been using Twitter much I guess.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by Sangermaine on Thursday November 02, 2017 @03:21PM (#15613420)

No one believes that banning Nazis from Twitter is going to magically make them go away, but it does remove a platform for them, or at least hinder their ability to use it.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by custos on Thursday November 02, 2017 @03:10PM (#15613345)

I don't know, but I remember when hating Nazi's was as American as apple pie or baseball.

Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942 if I recall correctly; were all anti-Nazi and it was basically it's own genre of first person shooters.

Then everything moved towards terrorism related themes (Counterstrike starting that I'm guessing)... then political correctness just referred to it as "Opposing Force (OpFor)".

Weird times we live in.

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by sctb on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:53PM (#15613196)

Yikes, would you please not comment like this on Hacker News? We're shooting for a very different kind of discourse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Act... by microcolonel on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:35PM (#15613021)

No, the pro-Trump ones are just as annoying. Regardless of the opinion the chains take, it is annoying that they have nothing to do with the specific tweet.

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