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Twitter Continues To Have A [Twitter] Problem
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Eh. Myspace really kinda predates the biggest rise of this kind of thing. Especially on the corporate front. Myspace got in on the ground floor but got shanked by Facebook before social media really exploded into the mainstream.
Anti-trust has nada to do with moderation tho.
Hell, how would you even define “moderated”? To whose standard?
This doesn't explain why things that obviously violate their TOS (death threats, phone #s, stc) are left alone with replies of "nope that's fine" from support.
I mean, we can start with disallowing death threats and posting other people's personal information and work our way from there.
Which Twitter claims to do but apparently only randomly at best.
The first thing that comes to mind is layer one of Twitter's support is like Google's: it's automated. As is the second layer of support (and possibly the third*). It takes extraordinary effort to actually escalate to a pair of human eyeballs because those people are usually occupied with far more critical tasks.
*edit: as was discovered when Google had some issues where several people had their entire Google accounts locked out, and their situation was only resolved once they found a guy who knew a guy who worked at google who could escalate on-site.
Ok
My comment still stands. Just because they have a lot of users shouldn't mean 'oh well'
I'll rephrase: the technology does not exist to moderate modern social media effectively. We probably won't be there for about ten more years.
The technology absolutely exists and is already in place. The nazi thing in germany for example.
The volume of linked tweets around here have caused me to use Twitter more than I did!
I've just sort of naturally begun adopting as I click on a funny thing and my phone swaps over to the app.
No, something that Twitter claims works is in place in Germany, and for the moment the German government is satisfied with the current level of functionality. Whether it actually works as described is a very different set of criteria.
It's better than nothing
The point stands that they could be doing more and they won't. There are other options available for the vast majority of users (well, there's facebook at any rate)
The core problem, as has been discussed in other similar threads, is with people and society. You can only do so much to police institutions. Until society rejects it whole cloth, bigotry and hatred will insinuate themselves into our social spaces, entertainment, businesses, and government.
Well technically... They're still on the ???? Step of underpants gnome business processes.
I don't think they have any meaningful ideas on making money.
Well if you just care about the size to reach as many people as you can...
Tumblr? Same number of users apparently albeit with less "shout into the void" ability - there's no global hashtags AFAIK, though that may not be a bad thing per se
Facebook? 8x the users, I did a quick search for "transgender" in their groups feature and one group has 174000 members and there are dozens more with 10k+. I suppose if you're one of the people with millions of followers you might reach fewer people
Even when you post on twitter, you're either just posting to the people who follow you (average 200 but also apparently 80% of users have <50 followers so more likely a dozen or two) or you're using a hashtag that is being popularized and so the chance that any individual person sees your tweet is pretty low
None of the articles describing Twitter's takedowns reference automated moderation. In each case the articles describe, the foreign government identifies a particular account (Better Hanover, Paul Golding) or a particular hashtag (#unbonjuif, aka #agoodjew) which they take to have contents falling afoul of their laws, and then twitter has gone on to block the identified account or hashtag in that country. It's something that appears to happen on a bespoke, ad hoc basis, judging by the reporting, and there's no twitter algorithm behind it--the identification is all done by the complaining government. As far as I can tell, the idea of an automated Nazi flag is made up.
A lot of companies tend to have both anyway. But Twitter is much more of a bullhorn shouting at the masses then Facebook and it used as such. And it does it exclusively and more adeptly. It's basically like a platform solely about the Facebook newsfeed.
And then on top of that it's got all sorts of important/"important" people on it using it publicly in a way Facebook doesn't.
It's not that Twitter is too big to moderate. It's that Twitter isn't interested in moderation.
Ok, but that's still an action taken by twitter to uphold a law
Something they could be doing here
Bolded is why they have to do it in Germany. They don't do it here because for one, there are no laws against saying awful things in the US* and two, they don't have the resources or the technology to moderate at that level especially with malicious reporting slap-fights happening on at least a daily basis.
*yeah, it's a private company and Twitter can ban people, but for them it's an even more extreme game of whack-a-mole because there is no way to prevent someone from creating another account.
If twitter is such a massive mess, maybe they need to rethink their application. It'd be nice for some high profile celebrities to take an extended vacation and say exactly why they're doing it
The PA forums have managed to produce about 38 million posts in about ten years for an average rate of ~0.1 posts/s
In the same amount of time there have been something like 150 billion tweets, most of which are the last few years for an average rate of ~450/s
Current tweet rate is ~6000/s
There are ways to report posts right?
Presumably no one is reporting aunt eunices 130 character review of that buffet over in smithsburg, so twitter can probably focus on the illegal tweets or reported tweets and their work load will be massively reduced
Edit: tweets, not posts, sorry
God twitter is stupid
There are plenty of other options for what Twitter offers (Facebook, Google plus, minds, gab, Instagram, Snapchat) they're just the most used. They aren't even close to Monopoly status and any attempt at breaking up a company that actively loses money and has no real way of stopping competition is pure insanity.
PSN: SoulCrusherJared
There are threats, there are things people perceive as threats but fall into a grey area, and then there's just people online being dicks. Copying from the OP:
Bolded is despicable and in bad taste, but it is neither a threat nor illegal in the US to say those things. Bolded Asterisks (***) isn't precisely true, but it can definitely seem that way because of the moderation problem.
Is it against the tos? If not, could it be?
Twitter is not a public good, they get to say who is on their platform and who isn't.
They're not threats but I'm more than fine with Twitter, much like many private companies, banning them.
I guess the question is, how many tweets are flagged/reported per second/minute. Theoretically you should only need to review the ones that are reported or the ones that have specific keywords/phrases
PSN: SoulCrusherJared
They're a private company they can do pretty much what they want. Well until that whole gay cakes thing is ruled upon. After that people that can proclaim protected status could demand to be allowed on if that's how the cake thing is decided upon
PSN: SoulCrusherJared
And then whether you've keyed in the ⓊⓃⒾⒸⓄⒹⒺ variations of all of those keywords and phrases.
Based on what, user reports? The government requiring it? Is this entire thread just a stalking horse for an argument over the First Amendment?
So, as an illustration of how bad Twitter is at moderation, this was tweeted a while ago by a straight-up white-supremacist account (which is currently suspended, and I apologies in advance for throwing this shit up in anyone's face who doesn't want to see it):
The tweet has since been removed (you can still find the cached version, which is how I got that text), but originally stayed up for quite a while. Someone who doggedly points these tweets out to Twitter's founders/employees specifically asked one of the co-founders due of the length of time the tweet stayed up:
"Hey @biz, is this tweet "newsworthy"?"
@biz is Biz Stone, one of Twitter's co-founders. He replied:
You know it’s not. It’s disgusting. I reported it, and I hope you did too.
So, great! Awesome! Someone as important as a co-founder reported it, so I'm sure that was dealt with swiftly, right? Apparently not. Biz's tweet was replied to by another Twitter employee, Joshua Cohen (@heyjoshua):
I reported it too, @biz, and I just got a response back that the account hasn't violated the rules, so... what now? We seem to agree it's disgusting, we work here... what we can we do to fix this?
They're immensely bad at this, and Twitter is apparently largely run by a group from the "free speech absolutist" crowd. Their own employees sometimes take them to task about it, but little to nothing seems to be done. The other interesting thing here is that if Joshua got a reply that the account/tweet was fine then that means Biz did too, but he, himself, doesn't appear to have mentioned that bit anywhere.
I'm personally of the mind that I'd rather make issues like the one above very public in that I want Biz's and Joshua's tweets to make it around the Internet and rile up a bunch of people. Get enough people yelling at them, and maybe we get some changes for better moderation. I think the "just ignore it" avenue is largely useless and counter-productive. It's like saying "just ignore Fox News" or "just ignore InfoWars" or any other insane news outlet that has driven the right-wing into an unhinged frenzy. You can't ignore it, you've got to fight it in some way, and I think sunlight is the best bet in this case. Make Twitter's investors uncomfortable about what Twitter's allowing and maybe get some traction that way.
I said as much above
But unless the individual is a notable public figure, bans are toothless (once again, due to the moderation scaling problem).
You can't throw up your hands and say that it probably won't work, so there's no reason to even try. It does work. Countless other forums where people communicate online that whack the moles are proof of that. Yes, some do come back repeatedly. Most do not, or learn to act appropriately. That Twitter has more moles is not proof that it is impossible to whack them, just that there are more moles.
I don't see that happening given what the platform has been used for already. Trump used Twitter to spread birtherism and essentially pave the way for his candidacy and eventual victory and the mainstreaming of open bigotry like we haven't seen in decades. And from Twitter's perspective, it's been great for business.
So about the time we get cold fusion.
Sounds good. I'll keep trying my strategy, and encouraging others to do the same. :^:
Except that it hasn't. Twitter is hemorrhaging money, has no real path to revenue, and had several acquisition deals killed on the vine thanks to the toxicity of the service.