
“Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself” - cwyers
https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1143925272464506880
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freehunter
My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial
things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the
most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and
attack each other.

I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given
post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to
1000-2000 views, still short of my follower count. If it has sparked
controversy and there is a fight, I've had the views spike up over 8000-9000
without any shares. Facebook posts to your timeline "your friend commented on
this" and others start piling in too. Facebook emails me saying "this post is
getting more attention than 95% of the rest of your posts, please pay us money
to show it to more people". The more toxic the comments, the more views it
gets and the more Facebook begs me to pay them for it.

That's the problem with these algorithms that humans don't watch over. Usually
it works great and good content is seen by the people who want to see it. But
every now and again it goes out of control and people end up getting hurt and
Facebook/Twitter profit from it and even promote it. And as the person who
posted it, I have zero ways to stop it from spreading other than deleting the
post.

-edit- oh another story... I run a news site for a town, lets call it Townsville. There is another Townsville in another state, but it is not my Townsville. I had a post go super viral, 90,000 views from my 3k followers, because somehow the post made it to the wrong Townsville and 87,000 people were being shown the wrong news article. Again, I had no way to stop this, no tools to correct it. Absolute insanity.

~~~
omegaworks
The surprising thing about all of this is that sentiment analysis--machine
learning algorithms that can interpret the feeling you're trying to convey
with your words--is a fairly solved problem.

These companies can easily put a filter over this engagement maximization
algorithm and they are choosing not to.

~~~
trickstra
But why would they do it? They have some pretty solid data to support the
argument that more engagement, whatever the quality, equals more money to the
poster, and more money to the platform. There is no _bad_ publicity. The
question is what can we do about it? It exploits basic human psychology.

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lilbobbytables
"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself"

What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative
headlines could have been:

"Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers"

"Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness"

"Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your
cause or business"

"Twitter has an algorithm that expands your social impact from beyond your
sphere."

\---

In other news: public posts on public site go.... public.

~~~
wmil
I guess the point is that Twitter could easily tone down pile ons by noticing
that a tweet is generating many more replies than likes. Then reduce display
of that tweet instead of boosting it to non-followers.

Perhaps not for blue checkmarks (they've declared themselves central to the
public debate), but for average users Twitter should try to calm down pile
ons.

~~~
izzydata
That doesn't sound like a solid indicator of an issue. Two friends could be
having a back and forth discussion with no harassment or conflict. You'd end
up with 25+ replies and 1 like.

~~~
freehunter
What's the point of locating in Silicon Valley and hiring the smartest
programmers in the world if you can't figure out an algorithm to make hateful
posts not show up as often in someone's feed?

I doubt it's because they can't. The more likely answer is they don't want to.

~~~
pmarreck
It's actually a hard problem, similar to porn detection without using humans
(see:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)).
Blocking purely based on keywords or Bayesian filtering usually paints too
broad a stroke and ends up limiting well-intended free speech (I once had a
comment blocked for arguing AGAINST racism!). It's similar to the "blocking
all mention of sex also blocks sex education" problem. It seems to take a
fully-fleshed-out intelligence to grasp the true meaning behind even something
as innocuous-looking as a written sentence.

Your assumption that people more intelligent than you "should have figured
this out by now" belies the very problem- _no one_ has yet come up with a good
automated solution for this. If YOU do, you'll be a millionaire.

~~~
freehunter
Again, I disagree. Twitter came up with a way to make some posts more widely
shown, and you're trying to tell me they don't have a way to make some posts
_less_ widely shown? As someone else said, if there are a lot of comments and
few likes, don't put it in the trending feed. That's one solution for free,
and I don't even work for Twitter. If it's two people having a conversation
back and forth, the broader Twitter audience doesn't need to see it. It's not
censored, it's not hidden, it's just not broadcast either.

People have become millionaires, billionaires even, for the exact opposite of
what you say. You become rich by making sure controversial content is spread
as far and wide as possible, because hatred and fear sell as entertainment.
People get addicted to it. You don't become rich by filtering out hateful
content, you become rich by enabling it and spreading it because that's what
people want (as long as they're not the target).

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minikites
To an algorithm, harassment looks like engagement. To the market, engagement
looks like success. We're participating in a system that has no choice but to
create this result.

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amatecha
Yeah, this has been a pretty obvious change in the recent months/years. I
started noticing tweets in my timeline that were there because it was
something someone I follow had replied to -- and these tweets were often
"outrage-worthy" or otherwise click/flame-bait. I have since written my own
Chrome extension to hide all "suggested" tweets of that sort (as well as
hiding all sponsored tweets, and the "Favorite" button).

There's a pretty long list of CSS classes you can just toss a "display: none"
on, but unfortunately other stuff can only be discerned by checking that
certain elements are inside a given container. I had to start writing actual
JS to evaluate the contents of the page and omit/delete stuff that way.

~~~
chipperyman573
Out of curiosity, why did you hide the favorite button? Couldn't you just not
click it?

~~~
amatecha
Yeah, but I just don't even want to see it. It's a feature I would prefer had
never been added to Twitter (just like the other stuff I omit using my Chrome
extension). Visual noise distracting from the stuff I care about seeing. :)

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crb
There are two tiers of Twitter: the early-adopter tech users, who use third-
party API clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot, and everyone else.

The first bucket has a vastly different Twitter experience. As an API client
user I have no ads, no polls, no recommendations or friends likes, no "someone
you follow replied" experience. Just a timeline of who I choose to follow, the
blissful way it always was. No wonder they wanted to shut the API down.

(Apropos of nothing, the first bucket contains all the tech journalists.)

~~~
zippergz
I don't know if this is such a clean distinction. I have been on twitter since
the first 3-6 months that it existed as twitter, and I use the website and
first-party mobile apps. Are the ads and recommendations annoying? Yes. But
back when I used third-party apps (tons of them over the years, I think
starting with Twinkle, and then in some order Tweetie [which became the
official app], Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and probably some I'm forgetting), the
experience was bad in lots of other ways. As native photos were added, they
didn't display right. As native retweets and quote tweets became a thing, they
didn't work. I imagine now with tweet threading, there was at least some gap
between the feature existing and the third-party apps supporting it.

Obviously it's a tradeoff, but I found the downsides of the official
experience to be less frustrating than the downsides of the third-party
experience.

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scythe
I am slightly salty about this because I had complained about the same effect
on reddit with the red inbox — I disabled my own inbox years ago — but nobody
really cared.

It’s a more general case of advertising pollution. Just as it benefits
advertisers to make viewers uncomfortable and manipulate their attention,
Reddit and Twitter (and Facebook!) systematically display messages that make
users uncomfortable to get their attention, stimulate emotional vulnerability,
and create opportunities for marketers to step in with a palliative, “shopping
therapy”.

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numbers
It might be just me but wow, it's really hard to read multiple tweets as a
timeline since I don't know where to start and where to end.

~~~
kevingadd
This is because they broke threading and the replies section for a tweet now
shows parent tweets. It's bizarre, and twitter breaks the replies view on a
regular basis and only notices weeks later. It's not just you.

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noobermin
The magical step is the final step in the argument. The algorithm does seemt
to increase engagement altogether, but people's negativity bias will give more
weight in ones' mind to the harrassing comments. The algo does incentivize
replies it seems, which could potentially be negative, given people don't
reply to positive things beyond to like or RT them, so that's an argument in
their favor.

Of course, most people don't notice this. I've never had a post with more than
100 replies for example, so I would have never been aware of this.

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ankushnarula
Why would an amoral view of user engagement be a surprise for a company's
whose goal is to show as many ads as possible?

And on top of all that, Twitter's own editorial team regularly stokes
political/cultural controversy by boosting non-issues in Twitter Moments and
Trending topics.

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truculent
Gradient descent into hell

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6gvONxR4sf7o
I'm not engaged in the twitterverse, so a lot of the jargon goes over my head.
Can someone translate what happened?

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vqdwj
>The experience of having _made_ a viral tweet is The Worst Fucking Thing.

If you make a "viral tweet", don't read the replies. You have the tools to do
so, since Twitter allows you to mute a thread.

~~~
laughinghan
Most people use social media not with the intention of shouting into the void,
but with the intention of getting replies that they want to read, that they
then do read, and perhaps reply in turn.

If that's what usually happens, but sometimes randomly they get tons and tons
of replies that they _don 't_ want (as claimed by this post), that's an
interesting and noteworthy flaw that I've never seen specifically discussed.

~~~
nyuszika7h
You can also mute notifications from people who don't follow you / who you
don't follow, though it may not be desirable to keep it like that all the
time.

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parliament32
"Creates harassment" is very misleading. Twitter has an algorithm that shows
high-interaction tweets to more people, that's it.

I'm usually the last to defend Twitter but this title is pure clickbait.

