Why would they draw attention to this tiny competitor with the entirety of their media attention?

Don't you think that Twitter knows that they have a lot of watchdogs?

Assuming malice by default is the very least we could do to fight back.

For example, a cop can be incompetent when accidentally firing a gun at a person, and they can be punished for the mistake, but the victim is already dead.

My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior.

Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings.

Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm.

Since we can't ask a corp its intentions, it's fair to judge them for the consequences of their actions.

I.e. never give a corporation the benefit of the doubt. They’re the most important producers of our economy, and doing so allows them to be lazy (aka the complete opposite of “productive”)

Design the system in a way that it'd pick up competitor links as spam (without directly blacklisting them explicitly) using fine-tuned training data.

In case of media attention, tell it's an error and ML algorithms are blackboxes, and take action to "whitelist" those domains only when needed.

Yeah, we buy it, Twitter.

Wouldn't it be much easier to simply blacklist and put out some bland statement about "not supporting 'hate speech'" or something? It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it just matters that they paint the picture of them opposing something "bad". Lying just seems a lot easier than going to all of that effort.

It doesn't require more work than they are already presumably implementing for spam detection (unless I way too much overestimate big tech's abilities), it's a little touch to an already-being-implemented system with a bonus of being able to block competitors to some extent, without direct liability.

It's dead obvious that they do not want it. The reasons why is beyond me.

Someone whose job it is made a few mistakes. you must have made a shit ton of mistake too. Claiming otherwise is stupid.

What you and i can pinpoint on twitter spam is independent of "everything is evil". Difference.

Twitter is just too powerful with all those engineers and access to ML to have this just as a mistake.

Whoever is responsible for that flagging is either:

- Incredibly incompetent and not knowing what they were doing (which I honestly don't want to believe)

- Knew exactly what they were doing and it's intentional with a benefit of doubt with plausible deniability.

Unintentionally blocking a whole domain "by mistake" falls into the first point above.

Knowing track record of social media companies hiring good engineers and being evil, also knowing Mastodon being a competitor to Twitter, I don't think I need to tell much more.

I find this to be a stupid way to look at things. Incompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive.

Very good point. The latter may be used to distract from the former.

Seriously? This is absolutely trivial: you don't build a system like this in the first place, as whatever is failing here--and 100% if it is a system actively designed to prevent people from posting links to their own timeline--isn't providing value: it is just a bigger surface in which there are going to be random bugs and false positives. I will thereby repeat: building systems that occasionally set themselves up for mistakes IS THE MALICE. I am not claiming that making a mistake is malicious, or that only malicious people make mistakes: we all make mistakes, so we should thereby do everything we can to limit our power and refuse to build systems that might fail.

(edit: I added a paragraph here but it came after a reply, so I moved that paragraph--without further edit--to my comment reply to that reply comment.)

I'm a little lost at what your point is because if you think the above is malice, there's malice in every poorly implemented feature. Say Instagram does a rough check to ensure no nudity is contained in the images you're posting and that system goes down preventing you from posting to your own IG -- that too is malice?

This is known as cloaking.

Safe thing to do is to block the submission instead of letting it through anyway, or potentially downrank the tweet, or graylist or whatever, or put it into failed queue for investigation, or something along thoselines.

I think crowd here would be delighted when twitter allows spam links because they figured out a way to fool the preview service in some ways.

Regardless, if it IS a mistake, we can assume Twitter will offer a formal apology indicating that they made a mistake that accepts fault for the impact it had on others, explain how they think that mistake occurred in enough detail that we can agree that it was a mistake and not an excuse, they will take steps to prevent that similar mistake from happening in the future, and they will further attempt to "make it right" somehow to the mastadon community (particularly so, as this was a competitor) with some extra benefit or concession... right? I will note that going around making mistakes and neither apologizing for them not taking responsibility for them--instead just flippantly hiding behind "we all make mistakes" while continuing to put yourself in a position where your mistakes matter to people--is itself a malicious act.

Some features are definitely not worth the complexity they impose. Sometimes a feature is so important you need to add it despite the systemic risk that it obviously carries.

Most of the time the designer or implementer doesn’t stop to even consider this analysis and just fires off some code to add the feature and lets it become “technical debt” because it’s SEP at that point.

The best engineers have an immediate intuition about these types of features and a visceral reaction when asked to code them. Something along the lines of, “I have a bad feeling about this” to “No way I’m coding this, it’s a metaphorical bridge just waiting to collapse.”

If malice requires intent I think most of the time there isn’t actual malice. If malice can stem from ignorance then I fully agree with you.

You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.

When there is feedback loops involved (in the context of an integrity system, for example), it doesn't outright block everything. In the past work i had our systems blocked some publishers traffic wrongfully, while not blocking others when it should(i was in display ads).

I sure wish the bugs in my code ended up benefiting my company :)

Twitter may die, but i don't think mastodon would grow as much as you make it sound.

But assuming everything is of that nature is what I am against.

"sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct.

What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?

Let's kill it, board said.

Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?

Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...

Speaking from experience: 1. size of mastodon is such a small thing that i doubt twitter even worries about it, among other things they have to worry about - like monetization. 2. My guess is integrity system incorrectly marked a url or link crawler/preview/whatever service is failing to crawl the page, or something along those lines. It can be something else, but my overarching claim is that it was not someone going into admin UI and typing mastodon to block them explicitly to cut the competition out. It may still be a lowly paid employee incorrectly doing something, but it's not for cutting the competition out and very very likely an honest mistake.

That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.

What of it? Are you actually so naive to think things aren't working against us?

The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.

It doesn't even matter why as long as twitter is aware of it, and it gets fixed soon.

If you think it was political, you should certainly inform the FEC! They found that Twitter had acted "for commercial reasons and not for the purpose of influencing an election" so they'd appreciate the heads up.

Twitter changed their policy in response to criticism of the Biden tweets to "no longer remove hacked material unless it’s directly shared by hackers or those working with them" including the rally database, and they restored previously removed tweets about Biden.

So by your own measure, very believable.

There are now several intermediate steps they've added since then, like clear warnings [1]. This allows the account to stay active and still report on stolen data. Much better IMO, banning accounts is common practice, but too heavy-handed as to be the only tool Twitter has.

https://twitter.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/13632755827845529...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

I assume hunter Biden story is more of the "disinformation" moderators blocking wrongfully, or them shutting down Wuhan lab leak theory, but this smells very different.