> you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator
While I have a lot of issues with Twitter, statistically speaking, the chances of this happening seem to be very, very, very small. Twitter is not full of rogue "moderators" running rampant permanently deleting people's accounts left and right. You have to be (a) willfully spreading material that clearly violates Twitter's terms of service (cf. Alex Jones), (b) ignoring repeated warnings and essentially daring Twitter to enforce their own TOS (cf. Alex Jones), and in most cases, (c) high profile (cf. Alex Jones). It's easy to find people who are temporarily banned from Twitter for dubious/spurious reasons, but it's pretty hard to find people who are punted without warning for "going against the groupthink, man."
> But there’s also a larger thing here where Twitter apparently has moderation tools so powerful that they can immediately trigger bans for things other than what they’re actually looking for. The actual execution leaves a lot to be desired here, but the itchy trigger finger cannot be denied. Somehow they can do this, but racial slurs are generally pretty okay, white supremacy is largely ignored, and every Twitter troll I’ve reported for harassment gets a three-week investigation and then a “We find they did not violate our rules” email.
This is one of the things that annoys me most about major sites like Twitter or YouTube. Inconsistent enforcement of rules and little to no avenue for appeal.
> (Of course you'll be able to find a bunch of death threats from random accounts all over, I could find a handful in a few minutes, but that's largely outside of anyone's control.)
I think this is what I don’t understand about the general sentiment that Twitter is some kind of uber-censored platform. Sure, high profile accounts and tweets can sometimes be removed, but have you ever tried reporting tweets?
9 out of 10 times that I report tweets threatening violence or harm against someone, I get a notification a few hours later that the “moderation team” has reviewed that tweet and found it not to be in breach of any policies.
Twitter’s reporting system is ineffective at best, and I almost wish I had seen the kind of heavy handed moderation that people prescribe to Twitter here.
> You need to really, really limit bias as much as possible, so that you're booting out people or bots because of their behaviour rather than their political/social stances.
This is a political non-starter right now, which is why Twitter doesn't do it. Seriously, when they accidentally ban someone for threatening violence against other Twitter users in the name of left-wing activism a huge swathe of the tech and security community launches a campaign to reinstate them and accuse Twitter of all matters of evils fro banning them in the first place.
> This whole situation feels messy and gross but I think they’re absolutely right that Twitter has massively overstepped what would reasonably be considered moderation.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
I feel like it's important to note during these discussions that twitter was a 4chan-like platform until it started doing political censorship leading up to the 2020 election, and it is currently a 4chan-like platform that practices political censorship and virtually no other type (4chan is a very successful and influential platform that other platforms, like reddit, imitated.)
You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested. You can create a #fuckingidiot hashtag and organize hundreds of people under it with the sole purpose of harassing this one person. Twitter will not be interested in it, and will not censor you.
Twitter is not censoring for civility, it's censoring for orthodoxy.
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
> People like Twitter because of their draconian moderation efforts, I was banned from Twitter because I told someone that a death threat was not ok; apparently Twitter decided that I since i said "shut up" that i was somehow the aggressor.
Such a strange comment because it's diametrically opposed to my experience of Twitter. People aren't complaining about 'draconian moderation efforts' as much as rampant abuse, trolling, and disinformation.
A simple "shut up" tweet would never get banned — far, far worse seemingly goes unpunished. I suspect there's more context to that one than you're letting on.
> "I think there's a possibility that the arbitrary enforcement is partially because Twitter knows that if it were consistent in enforcing its own rules, so much of its population of users would disappear that it would be hobbling itself."
This x100. If you have no followers and no one is re-tweeting your vitriolic slime, why should twitter care, they simply want you to stay on the platform. Now if your circle has reach and you are a known public name, they must act as if they care. They play politics to please the masses, without subjecting the masses to the same politicking.
It seems in their effort to ban people for wrong think, they banned the wrong group. They should have been banning the cancellers. "I don't engage on Twitter out of fear," is not a good sign for retention or growth numbers. Twitter seems to be killing itself by allowing this cancer to grow.
Have you ever been on a pretty great message board / forum and a bunch of spittle people join and makes the board suck to converse on? Eventually that board is nothing but spittle people, then the board dies. Twitters seems like it is going this way.
FWIW, I cancelled all my social media accounts after the Snowden revelations in 2013. I'm just an outside observer, but I'm certainly glad I'm not inside.
> You seem to lack empathy for people who's content is being removed from these platforms.
I lack empathy not because I disagree with their politics, but because "getting booted out of a social space on the internet" seems like a strange non-problem.
Keep in mind that Twitter moderation is a joke no matter what side of the aisle you're on, and people leave not only because they got banned, or somebody they liked got banned, but also because of the perception that the moderators are asleep at the wheel and are too slow to take action - if they ever do.
Thing is, this is the internet. There are other sites out there. Most of them are accessible from typing something in your web browser. If there is a social space out there whose moderation you find more agreeable, why would you hang out someplace you're not welcome?
> We have to continue to protect peoples' ability to express themselves universally as technology evolves and provide platforms where they can't be bullied and destroyed by a riled up mob or institutionally silenced and de-platformed for dirty content.
You're not going to find that platform on Twitter. But you shouldn't have expected to find it on corporate-owned advertiser-friendly Twitter in the first place. The revolution will not be televised; brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions.
> The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has
I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.
Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
> sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.
I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.
Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
>"being part of a network that was artificially promoting tweets and content."
This is part of the reason why I detest Twitter's leadership. It's the tyranny of selectively enforcing the rules and hiding behind it. If you tell me the same dozen or so twitter handles that always manage to chime in at the top of just about every trending social topic are authentic, I simply won't believe you. Why aren't these banned?
> You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big
Instance admins can certainly be more decisive and just ban anyone they want without causing a media storm. Not sure if that's what people meant when they asked for a Twitter alternative.
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
There is no such requirement.
Twitter is well within its rights and ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed.
Moderation isn't an algorithm, a binary condition, applied perfectly to an input set to get a deterministic output. It's subjective, and that's both OK and correct.
> One thing I really like about Twitter is that you can choose to follow who you want. If you don't want to see memes making fun of you, just don't follow accounts that post/retweet these memes.
My experience of Twitter is the opposite. Someone I follow posts something I think is intelligent and polite, and the replies are filled with people launching tangential attacks and making weird accusations.
A tweet is like a tiny conference talk whose attendees are self-selecting. Yet random strangers all over the world are able to detect the in-progress talk, parachute in, and yell crazy things, and nobody can take away their microphone.
> It's sad that Twitter is banning satire accounts. I'm against all censorship of lawful speech, and condemn Twitter and any social media platform that participates in this kind of censorship.
But suppose hoards of people with political opinions you detest start creating accounts that pose as "your side", using the worst possible arguments for your positions, insulting everyone, and making "your side" look stupid and cruel. Is that a kind of speech you want to protect?
>My biggest issue with Twitter is the lack of moderation, theres SO much propaganda on there.
Yes and no. There's too little moderation in some areas and way too much in other areas.
If you follow conservative politics, someone can say something like "men are women are biologically different" and they'll have their account banned for a catch-all "hate speech" violation. Meanwhile, someone can say "Trump should be assassinated", and get thousands of retweets and no administrative action.
Case in point, Trump is still banned from Twitter for tweeting "go home in peace and love", yet Putin, the leader of a country we're currently in a proxy war against, still has a verified account.
Bottom line, Twitter is an irredeemable toxic cesspool full of both propaganda and massive censorship.
> I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people.
That's up to your message though. If people share your tweet, it might. If you're banned from the platform, that's not an option, no matter how many people find your opinion valuable, they'll never see it.
While I have a lot of issues with Twitter, statistically speaking, the chances of this happening seem to be very, very, very small. Twitter is not full of rogue "moderators" running rampant permanently deleting people's accounts left and right. You have to be (a) willfully spreading material that clearly violates Twitter's terms of service (cf. Alex Jones), (b) ignoring repeated warnings and essentially daring Twitter to enforce their own TOS (cf. Alex Jones), and in most cases, (c) high profile (cf. Alex Jones). It's easy to find people who are temporarily banned from Twitter for dubious/spurious reasons, but it's pretty hard to find people who are punted without warning for "going against the groupthink, man."
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