Lawsuits challenging a censorship action or account suspension relating to censorship should be granted an exception to the otherwise binding arbitration agreement.
The purpose of this would be to deter ad hoc political censorship, and to instead encourage these companies to move towards a more procedure driven censorship system in which they simply respond to court orders and leave everything else up. So, for example, if I sued the John Doe operating this account for copyright infringement or if a law enforcement agency won a court order to get the account taken down for posting illegal pornography, that's fine, that's how things are supposed to work.
If instead the service is just arbitrarily censoring people, they have to keep strict records of their work products and produce those records in discovery. The companies would also have a hard time deflecting responsibility onto individual censors because almost anything that they could possibly do would be within the scope of their employment.
Yes, this would make what most of these companies do with their censorship teams economically impractical. That's the point.
Only a nonprofit out-of-reach of any particular governments' jurisdiction can remain neutral, but they also need minimal, clear, healthy, and conscientious moderation to not be springboards for harmful activities.
It is hard to classify censorship as speech for a site that it is all about user-content.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/900/commercial-...
I understand that some people don't like this situation but that is the reality of US federal law today. It won't change without a Constitutional amendment, or a major realignment of the Supreme Court.
The food safety labels is an interesting point, but I'm not even talking about gov regulations here. Just, let's say Twitter deletes your post. What do you sue them for?
The 1a allows twitters employees to express themselves as they wish, even through the company, so their removal of your post is simply their own protected expression.
Any amendment written before slavery was abolished probably had a rather flexible view on the whole "people" issue. If an African American can be property then a corporation can be a person.
I made one comment on this and that makes me obsessed?
> This discussion has nothing to do with race.
The claim was that it applied to people, I merely mentioned that what the law considers people is a rather flexible thing.
Their _entire_ business model is predicated on their algorithm manipulating engagement. There's very little "organic" engagement on social media any more.
It's Twitter's audience, not yours. That's why I left: I got tired of sharecropping.
You can't spam, but they can inject ads inline.
In which case I absolutely do not want accounts to be artificially increasing engagement.
Even more so when they're owned by specific interest groups.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-mani...
Good way to get an account suspended, I suppose.
1) Every account on Twitter has "bot activity associated with this account": if for no other reason that random advertising bots retweet, follow, or like random people and posts to attempt to blend in as a genuine account and hide their true purpose. This reasoning gives Twitter essentially carte blanche to delete everybody, even assuming they were willing to be fully transparent about the evidence surrounding their bans (which they're not).
2) Bad Actors can easily sabotage accounts they dislike. Here's just 1 method how this can be done: there's 10,001 shady fly by night firms in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and other countries that offer services to "buy followers" or "buy retweets". It's trivial for somebody without programming skill and even a few hundred dollars to just buy mass spam and shill the hell out of an account (the lower quality the better) until somebody notices and that account gets banned.
You don't even have to assign bad motives to Twitter to see the obvious problems here.
Actually serious.
But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it?
I'm not trying to pick on anybody here, but I believe there's a level of arrogance in thinking that this form of sabotage is somehow a solvable problem unless you somehow have access to all communications on the planet.
In this case, a fairly straightforward account age rule would get you like 95% of the way there. My twitter account, which is 7 years old and has a few hundred followers and tweets once a week isn't going to benefit from this. You don't ban it. Similarly, you don't ban a 7 year old account with 10s of thousands of followers that's been doing the same kind of tweeting for 2 years and recently got a bunch of bot follows.
On the other hand, a 3 week old account with a ton of bot follows is suspicious. This'll miss older accounts that were unused and changed (e.g. if my account suddenly started tweeting 17x a day about divisive political content and suddenly got a bunch of bot follows, so you need slightly fancier approaches).
You probably further improve this with some kind of multifaceted account realness score based on a pagerank like analysis of followers (following bots lowers your score, as does being followed by them). And ofc you still ban the bots, but you don't punish any accounts above a certain threshold of "real".
The other part of it is that randomly sabotaging twitter accounts isn't going to happen very often, it costs money, and unless there's an ROI (extorting people), no one is going to do it except a handful of people for teh lulz or whatever. But importantly, most of those people will be bad at doing this kind of attack in a convincing way.
There are lots of difficult problems, but OP chose one that doesn't happen and is straightforward to address.
Yes, this is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing though (and goes to the "change in behavior" thing I mentioned, which while more challenging, is still often detectable).
> Brigading attacks by flagging content in bad faith are also very common for political and ideological reasons.
Yes, but this is distinct from trying to frame someone for purchasing/using bot follows, and so is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing. I agree that this is a challenging problem to solve, it's just not the one that was mentioned.
I'll reiterate:
There are challenging problems in abuse detection. Someone abusively using fake accounts to frame a legitimate user else for using fake accounts isn't a particularly challenging (or relevant) one.
b) For your page rank analysis, how do you a priori decide who is a bot or not? Oh I know, you can look at a bunch of data like posting frequency, location, keywords, links posted, and other things, and try and create some clever formula to decide the likelihood that some account is a bot. But at the end of the day, even the best possible approach is going to miss bots created by even half-way clever people, and wrongly screw some innocent people over.
c) What about transparency? How can the public trust any of Twitter's claims that bots did X, therefore we had to ban account Y? Where's the proof? Given that bots on Twitter are endemic, this accusation would always be technically true, to some extent.
d) The amount of money and effort thrown around to influence social media is staggering. Even if you can't program, even an average person can buy tens of thousands of followers for what amounts to pocket change. The crazy Twitter activists who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter wouldn't be willing to spend what amounts to a few days worth of minimum wage work to try and take out some arch-nemesis? A shady political activist who wants to influence politics or hide some damaging info and has access to millions of funding isn't able to arrange this? A nation state who wants to put their thumb on the scale of American public opinion can't spend the tiniest bit of pocket change for a concerted effort to move the scale of public opinion?
e) I don't want to be insulting, but your stated approach and mentality here is exactly why Big Tech algorithms screw over so many innocent people.
Isn't that the whole point of Twitter?