
Twitter is “shadow banning” prominent Republicans - yasp
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43paqq/twitter-is-shadow-banning-prominent-republicans-like-the-rnc-chair-and-trump-jrs-spokesman
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dmix
I really hope Twitter keeps doubling down on this behaviour so we'll all end
up on a better decentralized system. (An engineer can dream.)

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repolfx
Plug for Fritter, a decentralised Twitter-like app that uses the DAT protocol.
Grab Beaker Browser and check it out:

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dragonwriter
Equally accurate headline for article content: “Twitter announces plan to make
exception in automated anti-troll system to favor prominent Republicans”.

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mkempe
You are claiming that, in response to a news story, the intent to remove a
shadow ban applied to notorious Republicans but not to any Democrats is
"favoring" Republicans. [added: And you've been upvoted]. Natch.

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dragonwriter
Yes, the intent to remove the shadowban applied by an automated troll-control
system to prominent Republicans because their posts engaged in troll-like
behavior (and not to Democrats because they did not engage in the behavior
that the system was aimed at) behavior favors Republicans.

And, specifically, trolling Republicans.

You'd think Republican sympathizers would get that, since they are the ones
who spend so much time arguing (usually against a strawman in the specific
context they argue against it) that seeking equality of outcome across a
status differential rather than status-blind equal treatment by merit/behavior
is status-based favoritism.

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candiodari
Do you seriously believe Twitter management is incompetent enough to:

1) not notice this

2) not do anything about it

And of course, if one assumes they are in fact smart (how much do they get
paid ?), one has to conclude they know. If they know, they caused it, at least
through inaction.

But I'm not 16 anymore, and I don't believe it's merely inaction.

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mkempe
I'd like to understand what reasoning one goes through to embark on such an
illiberal path.

(Note: not arguing that they can't legally do it, obviously a private business
is free to promote or hinder various messages on its own platform. I'm
wondering about internal justifications, and logical consequences. Ethics and
morals, in other words.)

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DanHulton
From the article: “I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account
_behavior_ not the content of Tweets.”

It sounds like it's an automated system attempting to de-emphasize certain
uses of the platform, not someone standing there going "Okay, Republican?
Shadowbanned. Next? Republican? Shadowbanned. Next?"

i.e. if you don't want to be shadowbanned, maybe stop acting poorly.

~~~
ZainRiz
Most likely this is an AI/ML bases system that is doing Natural Language
Processing to determine if an account is exhibiting "bad behavior"

That means first they identified many badly behaving accounts, trained their
ML model to auto-detect other accounts behaving badly, and then banned them.

Of course, these ML models are famously hard to decipher.

The implication?

Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original
set of accounts they used to train their model (most likely it was accounts
that had been manually banned in the past, these would have been bans which
went unnoticed by the media) but they can't say "our model auto-bans accounts
which do X, Y, and Z" because the logic used by the ML models is too obscure
for any person to understand.

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mcphage
> Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the
> original set of accounts they used to train their model

The first step to blocking trolls is to _not help them understand how they got
identified_. Seriously, ask Google what algorithm they use to block scammers.
They aren’t going to tell you, because then the scammers will just use it to
screw with search results even more.

~~~
mkempe
So, a group of notorious Republican congressmen are trolls and scammers?
that's how you believe Twitter makes decisions?

