> Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
Of course it does.
When you make something easier to do, the effect is it increases the chance of people doing it.
If your contact information is listed in a telephone book, it is publicly accessible information. Anyone can look that up. But who's going to do that? (to prank call you for example). But if some posts your info to a twitter account that reaches millions, chances are someone's going to call you. Why? Because popped up in millions of peoples' twitter feeds. And since it's so low effort, one or more people with nothing better to do will call.
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
That assumes that all users on Twitter are equal. By Twitter's own rules [1], there are two classes of users. Elected officials are held to a different standard. That's why this tweet is hidden behind a click, rather than removed. That's why Trump hasn't been banned despite repeatedly violating the TOS that he agreed to when he signed up for his account.
It makes sense to me that if elected officials (a tiny fraction of the population who already have a much bigger voice than the common citizen) are allowed to break the plebeian rules, then social media platforms should be more willing to point out when they're doing so.
> * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences
This doesn't pass the smell test in my opinion. Given that everyone who tries to create an account without a phone number has to go through the friction of getting their account locked immediately, they clearly don't care about this sort of friction. Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a tweet which has been discussed at length on HN before.
> Twitters official policy is to not allow publication of hacked material or information with Personally Identifying Information
The root of the issue here is that Twitter is the one deciding this in the first place. What appears on their platform influences large numbers of people. I know it, you know it, and know it too--influencing people to e.g. buy stuff is how they make money after all. It's not hard to understand why a company with such influence making such large impacts without being accountable to the public scares people, particularly those who evidently think differently than those who run these companies.
It is absolutely trivial to get banned on Twitter. My favorite example is someone I know getting banned for posting pitbull fatality statistics. They were banned for “racism”. Against dogs.
>> I always wondered how much is in the interest of Twitter to get rid of fake accounts. <<
Mr. Eden there found out how to identify them quite nicely without having access to internal Twitter tech, so my guess is Twitter could have done the same, but hasn't. So I think the answer is, "not much."
I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.
Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).
It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.
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.
> But it's also worrisome that a single company has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas.
Twitter doesn't have the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas. Not by a long shot—the very idea is laughable. Twitter has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas via twitter. And that is in no way worrisome; that is a very good thing! If it were impossible for Twitter to do so, that would be worrisome.
>>Also, Twitter is a privately owned platform, not a government or a public square.
This is a terrible argument and people need to stop, at least you did not all use the trite "can't yell fire" non-sense but "they are a private company" is right up there with that.
>>Also, merely classifying data is not preventing its spread,
It is highly unlikely that this stops at just classification and tagging. I am sure there is some element of Suppression as well
> I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
At the very least, I think social media should be legally mandated to provide a chronological feed. I’d argue rules should go further and ban algorithmic feeds outright, though I’m not sure how such a ban could work in practice.
Amusingly, I remember Musk himself was talking about open sourcing Twitter’s feed algorithm and other such aspirational goals. How times have changed!
>"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 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."
How would destroying it prevent that again, people would just go elsewhere. You’d prevent it by Twitter thriving then clever use of algorithm suppression and shadow bans.
> And they appealed and then Twitter decided to uphold the decision.
Does Twitter ever not uphold its own decisions? I have serious doubts whether an intelligent human ever looks at these cases.
> Let's also not ignore the tweet and the thread is a really shitty joke. Then you go on to make a huge deal out of it? Just delete your dumb joke and move on.
There are several problems. One: "By clicking Delete, you acknowledge that your Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is a forced confession of an innocent person. You don't see a problem with that?
Of course it does.
When you make something easier to do, the effect is it increases the chance of people doing it.
If your contact information is listed in a telephone book, it is publicly accessible information. Anyone can look that up. But who's going to do that? (to prank call you for example). But if some posts your info to a twitter account that reaches millions, chances are someone's going to call you. Why? Because popped up in millions of peoples' twitter feeds. And since it's so low effort, one or more people with nothing better to do will call.
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