I have been responsible a bit of content moderation myself, and interacted with mods on various forums. It's possible that this is responsible for some of my views, summarized here.
- The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated. I am sure most moderation tools are secret, including whatever Twitter (or for that matter, HN) uses today.
- There are aspects of user privacy that are important (e.g. how user data is gathered, where is it stored, whether it complies with various data governance regulations) which would be interesting, but have been largely ignored by these Tweets so far.
- I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
- All companies have hierarchies of escalation. It is not surprising to me that there is a "top people" level of escalation in the form of SIP-PES that Weiss mentions. In fact, I'm reasonably sure something similar probably exists at Twitter today, consisting of Musk and some close advisors. They might even be using the exact same group!
- A lot of the discussion Weiss quotes as if it's top-secret information seems to show...individuals behaving reasonably while struggling with the extremely hard problem of content moderation at scale? Roth and others seem to be essentially saying, "We don't want to kick these users off the platform. Maybe if we limit their reach a bit, we won't get them inciting howling mobs that target and disturb other users?" Post-Musk Twitter seems to be struggling with the same thing, as the Kanye West debacle shows.
Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror. All I can really see is a company that never grew to Facebook scale trying to grapple with its content moderation problem without having the resources or perhaps temperament to hire hundreds of cheap content moderators like Facebook does.
> I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
Colloquially, I think many information suppression tactics get lumped under the term "shadow-ban" and that your definition is very narrow. It reinforces your position so I understand why you're defining it as such but it's not very convincing to anyone who doesn't share your position. Of course, that's assuming you're genuinely interested in persuasion instead of yelling into the echo chamber.
I do agree with your points about this not being a surprise and how some are over-exaggerating the severity of these leaks but I'm also slightly concerned over how blase "hackers" here on this site are treating the news. All around us are these huge, easy-to-abuse, global influence platforms with cozy backchannels to the most powerful bureaucratic state (US govt) that we've ever seen. And yet many comments I've seen so far are along the lines of, "No worries, this stuff happens all the time and is totally normal and okay. Move along now!" I would have expected more skepticism, cynicism and backlash from this crowd. Am I wrong?
I agree that colloquially it's definition can be looser depending on context, but it's in bad faith that Weiss[0] quotes Twitter's then Head of Policy and Trust as saying Twitter doesn't shadow ban people when in the very blog post[1] she's quoting they clearly define shadow banning as, "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."
> "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."
This happened to my tweet here [1]. It doesn't show up under the parent tweet [2]. It appears to be some sort of domain-based shadow filtering.
It's probably because of the cheap .win domain I bought for $2. Why would Twitter censor that link? One could speculate it was because patriots.win moved there from r/The_Donald. But they "don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology." right?
For the record, I built Reveddit because I perceived that r/The_Donald made heavier use of shadow moderation than the rest of Reddit. However I later learned that its use is common across Reddit and other sites.
Shadow moderation is nobody's friend, except to serve as a reminder of that fact. It was purportedly built to deal with bots, but bots know how to check the visibility of their content. It hurts genuine individuals the most.
Shadow banning was not built to deal with bots. The practice was popularized in various communities long before bots were a serious problem.
It was built to deal with jerks who, when moderated, would sign up under a new account, or would repost the same content over and over again, or who would invade discussions, distract them with vitriol or out of context nonsense – even if each post as original.
The whole point of the concept was that the jerks would FEEL like they were contributing to the discussion, but maybe being ignored, while maintain a static history or login that made it easier to moderate them.
I think that might have been its original purpose, but I can't help but believe that this is evil.
People are quick to jump to the "It's their website, they don't have to do anything yada yada" but there is an implied social contract between the users and the owners that for whatever tier of service (free, paid, ad-supported, whatever) you are using you will receive an equal amount and quality of service as every other user on the platform.
I'm not against moderation, I'm against secret moderation that wastes the time of other people's lives. Just be forthright and tell people they are muted but can still participate.
That article barely scratches the surface of what's going on. Reddit alone has tons of secretive ways to remove or hide content, some of which I list here [1]. Others I mention in my talk [2].
I'm talking about the origination and evolution of a specific practice, called, specifically, "shadow banning".
Yes, other techniques exist. Sometimes people, being imprecise, ignorant and/or lazy, call those techniques "shadow banning", but that isn't what they are.
> Sometimes people, being imprecise, ignorant and/or lazy, call those techniques "shadow banning", but that isn't what they are.
What umbrella term would you use for moderator actions that are kept secret from the author of the content? "Moderation" on its own can be secret or transparent, so by itself isn't an apt description.
You are vastly stretching the definition of shadowbanning if you're posting a public link that everyone (even people who aren't logged in to Twitter) can see, and then claiming that it's suppressed because it doesn't show up in the replies of a totally different account's Tweet.
It's not a stretch, and it fits the definition Twitter provided. You wouldn't be able to find the tweet unless I'd linked it. It's shadow detached from the parent.
You're mistaken. I tweeted twice, once with the .win link, once without. The one with the .win link does not appear even when logged in as a different username. It does appear for me when I'm logged in as the same username.
So there is shadow moderation going on. I'm not so bothered about whether it's called a shadow ban or shadow moderation. Also, I can see why some former Twitter employees want this distinction to be understood given the post they previously put out. I just think that's a hard sell for the public who is just coming to understand this issue. Even I didn't know about Twitter's 2018 post.
Finally, there was already substantial dispute over whether or not Twitter's initial claims were accurate. See "Shadowbanning is not a thing": black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms" by Kelley Cotter:
Shadowbanning people means banning people, it's obviously separate from moderation of individual tweets. AFAIK the only subreddit that has banned me was the_donald, but I can obviously have my content removed if I post to a news subreddit from domains they consider unacceptable.
It is honestly silly to be surprised. Any community with just a few thousand users will ban entire domains, it's not surprising that they resort to banning entire TLDs at the billion user level.
Would most people consider an account shadow banned when it can post as normal, yet its post are secretly set to have near zero visibility? The answer is self evident. Twitter tried to redefine shadowbanning to something they do not do, and then put out a post saying they don't shadowban. That is engaging in extremely bad faith. Using the definition as normally understood, is not.
One post there sums it up pretty well: Is it just me? Did I just read a blog post that said “We don’t do this thing I’m going to explain how we do the thing we don’t do.”
It doesn't matter what "most people" would consider, because Twitter provided their definition of the term at the time. People disagree about all sorts of terms, and that's totally fair, but what Weiss is doing is retconning her own personal definition of the term on Twitter's policy statements, which were unambiguous. She is, in turn, being unambiguously dishonest.
It's interesting how selective people are about the supposed Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Right, Twitter provided their own definition which delicately tiptoes around the unsavory issue and Weiss expanded the definition to suit her own self-interests.
How does that make what "most people" would consider not matter? Seems like a non-sequitur to me but maybe I'm not understanding your point.
Agreed, it's rare for any service to outright say "we shadow ban" as done here [1] for example.
And, most services still use a form of shadow moderation [2]. So it's perfectly fine to discuss here. Attempts to shut down conversation are just that.
Because the thread is about Weiss's claims. If you want to talk about how Twitter's definition of shadow-banning is problematic, or their moderation practices in general, start another top-level thread.
I have been shadowbanned on Twitter and it is very different, even with no followers. I don't even know what caused it but it might have been reporting a person who was inciting violence (who subsequently committed said violence). Ever since then Twitter has been blocked on my network.
> Colloquially, I think many information suppression tactics get lumped under the term "shadow-ban" and that your definition is very narrow. It reinforces your position so I understand why you're defining it as such but it's not very convincing to anyone who doesn't share your position. Of course, that's assuming you're genuinely interested in persuasion instead of yelling into the echo chamber.
Reasonable criticism. I suppose Twitter representatives have probably used this same definition to squirm out from questioning before, and it's not a great look. Although siblings comment are pointing out that Twitter did define it as identical to what I'm saying in a blog post; so at least they are consistent in what they were saying pre-Musk.
On the persuasion front – I'll give it a try!
I think the reason that Twitter hid behind the narrower definition of a shadow ban is to avoid saying the harder-to-stomach truth that "information suppression tactics", as you put them, are essential to content moderation. Think about this – is HN's (supposed) voting ring detector an "information suppression tactic"? Is flagging posts? Why is Bari Weiss not posting breathless stories about them? I think the only difference is that zero people in Weiss's circle use this orange web site. I would love to be convinced otherwise, though.
> All around us are these huge, easy-to-abuse, global influence platforms with cozy backchannels to the most powerful bureaucratic state (US govt) that we've ever seen. And yet many comments I've seen so far are along the lines of, "No worries, this stuff happens all the time and is totally normal and okay. Move along now!" I would have expected more skepticism, cynicism and backlash from this crowd. Am I wrong?
No, but I think we had our moment of outrage around widespread surveillance by the US government in 2013 and the years after it. Also, almost none of Weiss's or Taibbi's breathless revelations are about intervention by the US government – a few are about the Democratic Party and most are about Twitter itself. The only response that I see by a sitting Government official anywhere is to suggest that the Twitter ban on a story is against the 1st Amendment [1].
It's not reasonable criticism, because Twitter provided their definition of "shadow-ban" at the time, and it's unambiguously not what Weiss is talking about.
You can disagree with the definition Twitter chose, but you can't retcon your own definition onto Twitter's policy statements.
I'll be frank - I couldn't give a rat's ass about Weiss or Taibii. I'm not familiar with them and they're obviously trying to squeeze as much juice out of this story as they can.
However, I see a lot of people here dismissing the wider and (imo) more valid complaints about veiled moderation tactics by beating up these two and calling it a day, case closed. I don't care what specific narrow definition twitter chose on a whim in some blog post and I'm not concerned with strictly "shadow-banning". The fact is, these global influence platforms are easy to subvert by immensely powerful interests (state actors, billionaires, etc) and the power we're placing in these people's hands is incredible, way beyond what any authoritarian dictator of yesteryear could even dream up. And when how the sausage is made is ever so slightly exposed, it's dismissed and hand-waved away.
Basically every forum uses veiled moderation tactics out of the argument that if they unveiled their techniques then they'd be defeated. Which is what dang argues on Hacker News; in fact, you can't even see if there are penalties on your HN account.
The thread is about the false claims Weiss is making, not about your own opinions on moderation. What you should do, if you want to share those, is start a new top-level thread on this story. I'm sure what you have to say is germane to the story. It's just not germane to the thread you're commenting on.
OP made many points and I responded to one in particular with my opinion. Seems germane to me, although point taken about starting a top-level thread for better visibility/discussion.
You seem very set on keeping this top level thread on the topic you believe you won the argument on, and are refusing to discuss anything else in a very condescending tone. Just thought you should know your thinly veiled attempts at controlling the conversation to "win" aren't going unnoticed.
I'll also add that you're wrong about the topic of the thread, bavell's point is absolutely on topic and the only reason you're refusing to engage and call his argument a red herring is because you know he's right and don't want to admit it.
If a person makes an argument, and you rebut it with a bunch of unrelated arguments, the original arguer isn't obligated to address the unrelated arguments. You think they are, but in fact, that's the coercive argument, not mine.
The assumptive close might sell a used car, but "you just won't admit it" isn't especially persuasive on a message board.
If I wanted to control the debate (or however you'd choose to put it) on this benighted subject, all I'd have to do is keep posting on the thread, which immediately and thankfully got yanked off the front page by the flamewar detector. Oh, wait. You caught me! :)
I very much appreciate your good-faith response even though I'm not entirely convinced (yet?). Getting late for me so I have to bow out for now. I hope we as a community continue to discuss these issues, as it seems to be central to a lot of the problems we face today and will be facing tomorrow.
If the rules are not being applied equally across the political spectrum then your comment is simply obsfucation and misdirection. Completely missing the point.
To the extent that rules don't get equally applied by social media platforms, they're generally biased in favor of the right.
However, the right, due to its inherent animus for large sections of society, breaks the rules so much more often and so much more egregiously (eg Babylon Bee) that actual enforcement decisions are applied against the right more often.
The rules used to prohibit deliberate misgendering, which any reasonable person would regard as cruelty to a marginalized group. The right (such as the Babylon Bee) disproportionately engages in this action, so it used to get banned more for this.
This is also why anti-trans actions by right-wing state governments in the US have been consistently shut down by the courts (e.g. [1]). There is no evidence to support their actions -- they're driven by sheer animosity.
Nothing "nonsense" about this.
The way the right plays the refs is by claiming that the fact that the right gets banned disproportionately ipso facto means that the rules are biased. That's what's "nonsense" here.
> Although at least one key supporter of the Act in the
General Assembly justified its requirements in relation to supposed risks of sexual assault and
rape, there is (1) no evidence, in either the legislative record or the record of this case, that there
is any significant problem of individuals’ abusing trans-inclusive restroom policies for that
purpose and (2) no reason to think that, if such a problem existed, the mandated signs would
address it.
Again, nonsense.
You could make these kind of claims along any lines, for example, christians are the target of discrimination for their beliefs etc.
You just choose the ones that align with left-wing ideology and everything else is "hate" and deserving of censorship.
Why do (extremely) simple concepts like this need a 3rd party to support them?
The kind of "evidence" that is normally presented is typically provided by 3rd-rate activist researchers, attracted to dogma, and who simply come to whatever conclusion perpetuates that dogma.
So you still don't have any evidence for your claims then?
I've made claims here and presented clear evidence. You called it "nonsense" with no substantiation other than vague gestures toward Christians (which Christians?) being targeted (how?) for their beliefs (which beliefs?)
I understand that you're trying to drag me down to the meta level so you can beat me with experience, but I'm not willing to take the bait here, sorry.
>I'm also slightly concerned over how blase "hackers" here on this site are treating the news
There's a long standing phenomenon where the people working in tech have more visibility (or just insight) to witness business models slowly taking more and more advantage of the end user over the course of years, and don't notice that they've slowly hollowed out the standards they think they still hold.
For example: we all just sorta accept that some of our friends and relations work - or want to work - at places like Facebook and Google. There's so many of them that we wind up treating it like a morally neutral job or are seen as a weirdo.
When a layperson talks about their standards/expectations, they haven't had their barometer worn down over the years. All they hear back from those of us is in the know is some version of the "I'm not touching you" game.
"No we'd never do X, we do a lot of things that are in the same category you place X. Things that bother you for the same reason you don't like X. Things that would make you seethe if the tech wasn't impenetrable to you. But we'd never, ever, X."
> I'm also slightly concerned over how blase "hackers" here on this site are treating the news. All around us are these huge, easy-to-abuse, global influence platforms with cozy backchannels to the most powerful bureaucratic state (US govt) that we've ever seen. And yet many comments I've seen so far are along the lines of, "No worries, this stuff happens all the time and is totally normal and okay. Move along now!" I would have expected more skepticism, cynicism and backlash from this crowd. Am I wrong?
I don't think you are wrong. I do think this is a powerful tool, that should be scrutinized. But I also can't think of any better alternative. So, in the meantime, ISTM that talking about how it's talked about (as a great conspiracy and revelation, when it's well-known and the best known solution to a problem we have) seems the right way to go about it.
And note that not so long ago Musk himself said that this solution is what he wants for Twitter¹.
I just think when talking about the "Twitter Files", the more interesting story is how Musk is spreading disinformation and propaganda to increase his own wealth and power and how supposed journalists are uncritically helping him do it.
> It reinforces your position so I understand why you're defining it as such
The same could be said of Weiss or (by implication) you. "Shadow banning" sounds scary, which is precisely why people are flinging it around carelessly but also precisely why they shouldn't.
What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
“VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
All without users’ knowledge.
“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
> The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored.
I bet you would not like for your comment here to be secretly removed. In fact, many users are shocked to discover when this happens, as I share here [1].
Reddit and HN are...not Twitter? Guess which one of the three is regularly used by Taylor Swift.
The big difference is that Twitter links are routinely used by journalists and such who will notice and specifically call out Tweets as being deleted. A shadow ban / hellban on Twitter would be much more easily noticed by the media.
On the other hand, no one in the media to a rounding error cares about shadow bans on Reddit or HN.
Twitter is not "deciding" anything for you. Platforms like Truth Social and Mastodon exist. The next Taylor Swift and journalists are free to use them.
In fact, many have! It's going to be some Mastodon instance in my case, but not saying it couldn't be Truth Social for you or other folks that think they do a better job at content moderation than Twitter does. This is more productive than holding up Twitter's (admittedly imperfect) content moderation as part of some thought-molding conspiracy.
Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated.
Twitter has no legal obligation to do so. I think a lot of people would hesitate about engaging with a platform that actively has its thumb on the scale. I would really rather not have the thought in the back of my mind that invisible, unaccountable forces are the reason my views aren't popular, not that I'm an asshole with stupid opinions.
> I think a lot of people would hesitate about engaging with a platform that actively has its thumb on the scale.
I think a lot of people would hesitate about engaging with a platform that doesn't actively have its thumb on the scale. Those platforms exist, they are abandoned.
WhatsApp has a similar internal dashboard for moderation/managing abuse. WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, so it's entirely based on visible user-actions. I'm sure Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Pornhub end others that have any moderation tools are in the same boat. There is no smoking gun here, despite the breathlessness from some quarters (including Musk himself[1]). That "Show DMs" link did send chills down my spine though, sometimes I forget Twitter DMs are not E2E encrypted.
This has a lot in common with Mudge's whistle-blowing case: there is nothing tangible to those familiar with the arts, but it appears to be (or ends up being) red meat "Aha!" gotcha material for those who have never worked in similar environments.
1. Which begs the question: does he really think Twitter's mod tools are unusual, or is he feigning ignorance for some reason known to him?
Secretive moderation being common doesn't make it normal or right. It's certainly not widely known. For example, I was on a podcast from Aug. 24 this year talking about shadow moderation [2], and the host says around 27:50 that Twitter is not doing this, only excepting "the algorithm". His point, I believe, was that humans were not manipulating content, and I agreed that I was unaware if that was happening.
Plus, if the use of such secretive tooling were widely known, there would be no need to keep them secret.
The claim has always been that secretive moderation is used to deal with spam. Yet, spammers are the most likely to check the visibility of their content. So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.
> So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.
From first principles, the moderators would not consider shadow-banned individuals as 'genuine'.
Since you brought up the subject of spammers - whats your take on email spam transparency, and the use of spam folders? should MTAs (like GMail or Exchange server), in the interest of transparency, immediately reject messages categorized as spam rather than accepting and quietly placing them in the spam folder, never to be read by a human? This would absolutely solve the problem where emails from genuine users end up being blackholed in the spam folder.
Good question. No, I wouldn't support that. The current system works and there is still transparency. One of the two people in the conversation has a chance to review the content.
It may be that inboxes are different from public or open-ended conversations. What often happens in the moderation of public conversations on social media is that neither person is aware that any removal or demotion occurred. So, even the user(s) whose content was not removed does not have a chance to rescue the content from spam.
Yes, the secrecy does matter. I think can immediately think of two big reasons:
1) We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said. When censorship is carried out secretly it will inevitably trend towards abuse. One of the examples given in these leaks is that @DrJBhattacharya [1] was secretly put on a trends blacklist because of what he was saying. He's a well spoken doctor and Stanford epidemiologist, but he publicly spoke against the political measures being taken against COVID, such as lockdowns. So he was blacklisted. That's just so incredibly wrong, and enabled only by secrecy.
2) Again with the goal of adjusting how things are said, instead of what is said: If you think somebody is an idiot, saying that accomplishes absolutely nothing besides sending discourse to the level of a dumpster dive at a cheap seafood joint on a hot summer day. By contrast, engaging in good faith and simply discussing the topic not only keeps the conversation healthy, but might even actually change some minds. Secretly censoring the shitposter does not really encourage him to engage in a more productive fashion, because he may not even realize he's behaving a way that's not really considered acceptable, let alone attempt to correct it.
---
Literal spam is a different topic, and I think conflating the two is disingenuous. Doing things like blacklisting doctors because of what they say has little to do with banning somebody trying to impersonate other accounts and spamming 'give me 1 and I'll give you 2' crypto scams.
You are using phrases like "blacklisting doctors" and "censorship" while discussing (essentially) a message board that is used to sell advertisements. I don't think that's a reasonable position.
Twitter is a private company that wants to sell advertisements by enabling people to have happy conversations. Fundamentally, they are going to optimize for that, and not whatever high-minded ideals of censorship that we hold dear to our hearts. If a scientist is yelling about mysterious conspiracies and causing arguments on the site, they will use whatever least harmful tool is available to them to shut up said scientist.
It's certainly possible that Musk-owned Twitter will similarly pivot to selling advertisements for MAGA hats and guns or whatever; and censor all talking points that run counter to their views. This would also be a reasonable course of action for them, and many of us have prepared our migrations away from the site in case this happens.
Well, as long as you are in fact consistent about the position that it is "(essentially) a message board that is used to sell advertisements", with the presumable implication being that it is unimportant, replaceable and/or not an important venue for political discussion - and therefore in particular it is not a big deal if it is run into the ground or flipped towards the cause of a political group you are opposed to - then your position is sensible enough. However, this whole discussion is happening against the backdrop of a seemingly overwhelming majority of people in this community and the wider political sphere in the US asserting that it is in fact a big deal, which is inconsistent with dismissing allegations of wrongdoing by an argument from fundamental irrelevance. The majority position on the importance of Twitter is surely worth addressing, and if you disagree with that, you'd do better to raise your objection about relevance to that, rather than to a minority opposition arguing against the majority about a different aspect under the shared premise of relevance.
> However, this whole discussion is happening against the backdrop of a seemingly overwhelming majority of people in this community and the wider political sphere in the US asserting that it is in fact a big deal
I disagree with this, you are clubbing two groups together here. Yes, the wider political sphere in the US might be concerned because a billionaire can upend their carefully orchestrated social media campaigns. And I personally couldn't care less about that. For that matter, do you care about how well your favorite politician's next Twitter ad campaign goes?
Users in this community, on the other hand, are almost certainly technically proficient enough to back up their Tweets and quickly migrate to Mastodon or Tumblr or their favorite social network, should the need arise. In fact, dozens of us have already done so! For us, Twitter turning into Truth Social tomorrow would not be a Big Deal. This is consistent with my statement that the (probably) slightly left-leaning moderation on old Twitter was also not a Big Deal.
I’m fairly certain that the majority of people don’t give a damn about Twitter. The numbers I’ve seen say that less than a quarter of adults in the US use Twitter. It does appear to be very popular among journalists and politicians though.
> Twitter is a private company that wants to sell advertisements by enabling people to have happy conversations.
No, Twitter's mission statement is "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" [1]
Nothing in there about 'happy conversations' and, while selling advertising has been and may continue to be a means to fund this mission, it is not part of their mission. Means are not ends. Companies must run at a profit to survive but they must also work towards and for the mission they serve and the reason they were formed. The Twitter Files have shown that they were failing at this mission (especially the 'without barriers' part), either because they lost focus or were corrupted, or both.
Your previous comments are also correct. This has been the case with YouTube's empty 'mission statement':
> Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
> We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
Despite their ridiculous bans to those that never broke their ToS and YouTube never explaining what ToS did they break.
> If a scientist is yelling about mysterious conspiracies and causing arguments
"Mysterious conspiracies" by who? By the moderators who couldn't spell mitochondria or couldn't tell the difference between gene vs allele? Insults aside, didn't history give us so many "conspiracies" that turned out to be true? Like Heliocentrism，like climate change (in case people forgot how many people denied the climate change decades ago), like the theory of continental drift, like Darwin´s evolution theory, like captalism in a communist state, like the opposite view of McCarthy in the 50s.
I mean, how can Twitter's moderators, many of whom could barely understand college-level STEM or any subject, be so sure that they are on the right side of the history?
> I mean, how can Twitter's moderators, many of whom could barely understand college-level STEM or any subject, be so sure that they are on the right side of the history?
They don't need to be, in order to preserve the peace on their platform (for whatever definition of peace).
If you start yelling about mitochondria or climate change at Disneyland, you will be unceremoniously ejected for disturbing the peace at the Magic Kingdom. On the other hand, you can yell about mitochondria or climate change to your heart's content in the local town square all you want, courtesy of the First Amendment.
I don't understand why people think that Twitter, a private company, should be more like the town square than Disneyland.
> I don't understand why people think that Twitter, a private company, should be more like the town square than Disneyland.
In a way I agree with you. Twitter is a private company, and it does not necessarily have legal or moral obligation to be neutral or be a town square. Its staff should be perfectly safe to be biased towards left or right, or moderate content with or without facts or consistency.
I also agree with you that Twitter's staff needed to consider brand safety and how to retain advertisers. That's also the theory of Stratechery and why Ben Thompson thought that Elon needed to find revenue stream other than ads to really push his ideal of free speech on social media.
On the other hand, I do wish that Twitter a town square and they do have neutral or at least consistent moderation policies for practical reasons: millions of people do get news or information from Twitter on a daily basis. Millions of people do engage in discussion on Twitter on a daily basis. As a result, Twitter does become essential for facilitating and spreading information. In that regard, moderating debates, especially the controversial ones, can be harmful to the public. Imagine what it would be like if you were Botzmann yet you couldn't discuss your theory, or you were John Snow yet you were silenced for thinking cholera was not spread by miasma. Miasma was the mainstream theory in the late 1890s, no? In the eyes of the people in 1895, Snow was spreading "misinformation" that "could danger people's lives", no? We could safely bet that if there were Twitter at that time, the staff would be sided with the miasma theory, no? Another reason is in the spirit of "veil of ignorance". Society changes. People change. We're progressive today, but we can be conservative tomorrow. We can be left-leaning today and love projecting and attacking people's motives, but we can be right-leaning tomorrow and declare heresy this and evil that. I bet Robespierre believed that no one he guillotined was innocent and he could stay in power for long enough. I bet many people believed that the protestants in St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre deserved the death. I bet the elementary school students in China believed that they were righteous when they beat their teachers and school principals to death with knuckled belts. Without us believing that we can expressive our opinions in public safely, there will be guarantee that truth could come out quickly, and there will no guarantee that your group of people will be safe, no matter how dominant you are for now.
> We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said.
What? No. Platforms can censor whatever they want. The point is that users should be told when their content is actioned. Mod actions shouldn't be kept secret from the authors of content.
Therefore, we should be concerned with how platforms are censoring, and not what they are censoring. That is, a platform who tells you when they censor is more desirable than one who keeps their censorship secret from you.
> We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said.
No, there are certain topics that are simply outside of the bounds of acceptable discourse. For example, Holocaust denial is inherently uncivil and should be off limits from every general discussion forum, regardless of the wording the denier chooses to use.
> - The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated.
Sure, but maybe they should have some obligation? Maybe the people "gasping in horror" at this information actually did have more expectations around transparency and impartiality than you did, and maybe they're right to have those expectations?
> I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
You're splitting hairs. Laypeople take shadow banning to be various forms of suppression. This is the same as the hacker/cracker debate of 20+ years ago. Terms are defined by their usage, and once laypeople start using a term in a slightly incompatible way to how you've understood it, you've already lost.
Overall I don't quite get HN sometimes. Lots of people are saying this is no big deal, that every site will have secrete blacklists, that every site does moderation and suppresses things, and so on, so what's the problem?
Isn't it obvious that the way you do things can matter?
For instance, most techy people I've spoken to think that no-fly lists are problematic. Why were you put on a no-fly list? How can you petition for a review of your status if you think your placement was unjust? Who gets to decide who goes on that no-fly list? Is there any periodic review of such decisions to ensure there is no systemic bias or that the no-fly list isn't being abused for personal or political ends? There are many documented examples of people being targeted using the no-fly list for political reasons, for instance.
All of these questions apply to secret suppression lists at social media companies. If Twitter is to become a central place critical to democratic discussion, as Musk has stated is his intent, these questions are then just as relevant as the government deciding who can and cannot fly. The tweets Weiss posted have a number of examples of politically motivated suppression, and you shouldn't so causally dismiss that.
Combined with Taibbi's thread showing the government had some active involvement in moderating content, this is setting up a troubling precedent. This is a conversation that needs to take place.
> The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated
Let's play a hypothetical game. If restaurants were under no obligations to tell you what ingredients were in their food, but some did anyway, would that change your restaurant eating habits? If so, how?
> Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror.
I didn't "gasp", but, silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible.
He, and who knows how many others, presented sensible analyses against extended lockdowns in schools. This dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
The harm done to an entire generation of children is very real. The opportunity cost from wasting vaccinations in children is very real. The discussion was warped, and the narrative was rammed down people's brains. There are second-order effects with that kind of brain power-washing at mass scale.
This wasn't an isolated incident either. Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
> The dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
I would hope that journalists conduct their research through better means than solely reading Tweets. That would be an exceptionally lazy standard, one which would merit a failing grade for a high school paper.
That being said, "systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes" seems basically false given that this person co-authored a story that was published in the Wall Street Journal! [1]
> Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
Yes someone published a story in the Wall Street Journal, but this thread is talking about Twitter. Twitter is not exonerated because some other outlet did something differently.
The point here is that they were specifically responding to government requests to censor information. That is truly government overreach, but in the opposite direction to what you claim.
>Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
Just wait until you realize that corporations at a certain scale become a form of government themselves!
> silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible
My understanding is that anyone using the chrono timeline could still his tweets as they happened. Twitter deciding not to promote his tweets in the algo timeline seems far away from blocking.
He was right about lockdowns on school children having huge potential for harm. And it was very, very wrong to censor such posts.
And again, this was far from an isolated incident. Millions of posts were removed, tens of millions were shadowbanned, delisted, deranked, hidded, supressed, etc.
Views questioning natural origin, official policy, vaccinating children or school lockdowns were smeared as anti-science and sinister... The irony might be funny if it wasn't so harmful.
Twitter should have been more aggressive with taking down COVID misinformation, not less. I saw "#hydroxychloroquine" trend far too often, with posts advocating using it as a substitute for vaccines at the top of the results upon clicking it.
I don't like the term misinformation. I don't think Twitter should have restricted his tweets. However, it's important to remember Bhattacharya was wrong.
In the op-ed posted above he guessed that the predicted death toll of 2-4 million people was off by multiple orders of magnitude. He said that dramatic interventions like lockdowns would be justified to prevent that kind of death toll, but that COVID was nowhere near that deadly.
So far COVID has killed about a million Americans. So by the logic he lays out in that op-ed his policy proposals were wrong.
We can never know how many people Covid killed in America, because the rubric in the US is to count as a Covid "death" any death where the deceased tested positive for covid. In that group might be someone who would have not died had they not had Covid, but it also includes many people who would have died regardless of Covid positivity.
It is also to count as a Covid hospitalization, anyone hospitalized who tests positive for Covid in the hospital.
In both cases, all we can say is that somewhere between none and all of them are actually in that condition because of Covid.
He was responding to an estimate that placed the death toll at 3.4%.
The highest estimates now seem to be at around .28%.
That's more than an order of magnitude. He wasn't all that wrong.
Also, he advised focusing efforts on the most vulnerable; the elderly and people with comorbidities. He was very right there too. All those vaccines into kids and lockdowns of schools after the elderly were triple-vaccinated was a stunning misallocation of resources.
While I don't think many of Jay's points were wrong, he sort of established himself as an anti-establishment person. I think if he had acted slightly differently, we'd all be praising him for keeping us from making a big mistake.
But the reality is that the medical establishment has an immune system honed by decades of vaccine denialism (remember "vaccines cause autism because mercury") and tends to overreact when people- acting in good faith- question its findings publicly.
The medical establishment bring on a lack of trust due to their close ties with pharmaceutical companies who's aim is to simply make profits from the "medicine discovery of the day", no matter the consequences.
If the medical establishment (doctors, scientists, researchers, etc) took no funding from pharmaceutical companies, it might help their position. Taking funding from companies that have way too often been found of wrong doing, just poisons people's view of the whole system.
If we had insight about why the restrictions were applied, it would likely be more alarming. But this response in particular is a product of desensitized, you can't argue that morals and views have shifted even if you were a mod at some point, especially now e.g. post-Covid, post-Trump.
- The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated. I am sure most moderation tools are secret, including whatever Twitter (or for that matter, HN) uses today.
- There are aspects of user privacy that are important (e.g. how user data is gathered, where is it stored, whether it complies with various data governance regulations) which would be interesting, but have been largely ignored by these Tweets so far.
- I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
- All companies have hierarchies of escalation. It is not surprising to me that there is a "top people" level of escalation in the form of SIP-PES that Weiss mentions. In fact, I'm reasonably sure something similar probably exists at Twitter today, consisting of Musk and some close advisors. They might even be using the exact same group!
- A lot of the discussion Weiss quotes as if it's top-secret information seems to show...individuals behaving reasonably while struggling with the extremely hard problem of content moderation at scale? Roth and others seem to be essentially saying, "We don't want to kick these users off the platform. Maybe if we limit their reach a bit, we won't get them inciting howling mobs that target and disturb other users?" Post-Musk Twitter seems to be struggling with the same thing, as the Kanye West debacle shows.
Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror. All I can really see is a company that never grew to Facebook scale trying to grapple with its content moderation problem without having the resources or perhaps temperament to hire hundreds of cheap content moderators like Facebook does.