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Announcing the Twitter Trust and Safety Council (blog.twitter.com)
41 points by protomyth on Feb 9, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 64 comments



I'm sorry, but a council with more than 40 member organisations sounds a lot like lip service rather than anything substantive. How will this council do anything? The post explains why they need one, and says who they are, but doesn't say what they'll do apart from "tapping into their expertise".


I don't see the ACLU or any other organization dedicated to freedom of expression on that council. This doesn't bode well for Twitter's support of free speech.


Twitter has shown for quite a while that they don't care for freedom of expression (which they might be legally allowed to do, that doesn't make arbitrary censorship of users a morally acceptable choice).


Free speech isn't aligned with their business model and their biggest share holders are not so keen on it either. Not saying I agree with it, just stating that it's on par.


For years, Twitter promoted itself as paragons of free speech even calling itself the "free speech wing of the free speech party." http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wa...

It looks like they have turned their backs on that. I don't know how to see it otherwise.


And what happens when "more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions" aren't in agreement with each other?

This seems like hand-waving; and if it isn't, look what happened when reddit tried to move away from being an anything goes environment


I assume some of those organizations and experts are more equal than others.


For some perspective of how Twitter has changed over the years, particularly their relationship to free speech, here is Vice's History of Twitter's rules: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rul...


It's a worthy goal, I wish the name didn't sound so... I dunno, Orwellian?


> On Twitter, every voice has the power to shape the world.

> Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum

> ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence

Then why are they so eager to remove accounts of people they don't like or who speech they don't like. Weren't they bragging just last week about removing 125000 "terrorist" accounts.


Detecting and hiding abusive tweets algorithmically is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. These methods are employed widely by Facebook and Google. It's baffling to me that Twitter doesn't do the same thing, and is willing to burn money on pointless bureaucracy like this.

Remember the "Other" inbox in FB? Twitter abuse could have been a footnote on par with that. Instead it's the only thing anyone talks about (deservedly so).


When you say something "algorithmic" is "NOT THAT DIFFICULT" on HN, I feel like you shoulder some obligation to explain some of the algorithmic approaches. You know, if it really is "not that difficult".

That sure as shit sounds like a more interesting discussion to have than a semantic debate about free speech.


A regression model trained from existing spam and abuse report data to twitter would cover ~99% of terrible at-replies on twitter.

Look how effectively a hacked-together script that just uses a couple of heuristics like GGAutoBlocker works. [1]

Something a little more principled, trained with unfettered access to user data, would effectively kill the problem. IMO.

[1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker


Your understanding of what is difficult is wrong because you're looking at it as a detection problem when it's actually a false positive problem.

See: http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/


That is an overly simplistic problem description.

It's trying to identify spam/abuse in a universal way, which is a much harder (and barely coherent) problem, and then delete those tweets which makes the cost of a false positive much higher.

What’s far more feasible is to compute the probability a given user would like to see a specific tweet, and then have those below a certain threshold hidden (IE, don’t ping the notification tab for it). This is actually a very well-studied problem, and the massively parallel ML infrastructure it would take exists. Eg, http://www.datanami.com/2014/07/17/inside-sibyl-googles-mass...


It's amazing that Twitter seems to think pouring effort and bureaucracy into "gentrifying" its userbase is somehow going to turn around the service. Twitter has a major problem, but it's not cyberbullying or radical activists; it's that the product is super stale and they haven't innovated in years (ever?).

Not killing their ecosystem would have returned far more value to Twitter than becoming a platform with a hardcore political bias. Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency.


I find it hilarious / tragic that the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their social problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their product problems; and the top comment on "twitter attempts to fix their product problems" is that they need to stop doing that and fix their social problems.


> Their inaugural members go so far as to include Feminist Frequency.

Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter.


> Why is this going "so far"? Anita Sarkeesian has been the source of a bunch of online (and offline) harassment, and has been outspoken against it, especially on Twitter.

Except of course that she's cried wolf on many occasions (going so far as to /invent/ threats and then pretend that she called the police about it and they advised her to tweet about it) and in general has incredibly extreme views (which IMO don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny, but that could be my bias showing). The point is that a "trust and safety" council should also protect people from lynch mobs created by people like Feminist Frequency, right? So maybe we should get thunderf00t (not going to happen) to be part of this council?


[flagged]


> Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum.

"Women should be treated as equals" and "harrasment is bad" are opinions on the far end of the political spectrum? I think I just became an extremist.


She doesn't believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty (investigation into rape accusations is immoral, just sentence the male). Not to mention that she has such a broad defintion of terms like "rape" that it's quite disgusting to see her heralded as a defender of women's rights. And her video game criticisms (which is her whole thing) are so far removed from the actual content she's reviewing (inventing anti-women tropes that don't exist) that I'm not sure she knows what she's reviewing. There's lots of other bullshit (she's literally the mouthpiece of Macintosh, has lied to all of her backers and has cried wolf about harassment that didn't happen of she invented).

So yes. She's an extremist, and I'd argue she's barely a feminist (if you use the "equality for women" to mean that women and men should be treated equally and not women t treated "more equally" than men).


[flagged]


The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games?

Your initial argument about this person is facile. A pretty solid chunk of the "mainstream" throughout the world would also have problems with the "radical politics" of GLAAD.

It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread.

You should cut your losses on this unproductive subthread, which, as you clearly knew when you started it, can't possibly remain on-topic.


> The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games?

She's a video game critic.

> It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread.

I'm not familiar with all of the other members. Feminist Frequency stood out because they're an organization I know about.


That's the point. Everyone's got advocacy organizations that disturb them. Plenty of Americans and Europeans will have problems with Islamic advocacy, too.


My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech. Twitter is most obviously not that at this point, but the language in this announcement claims that they are making these changes to help grassroots activism. What they really mean is grassroots activism that they agree with.


Yeah, that's definitely my biggest concern - that this will basically be used as a partisan political tool for head bashing.

Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this.


> Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this.

I don't see one in the mix. I do see some suicide organizations that would be helpful in a different context[1].

I am still thinking what I should think of this: http://dangerousspeech.org/guidelines

1) I cannot help but think of the lost opportunity in social media of addressing people who feel "outside". Things like this won't help at all (and will probably hurt), but it seems the greater reach in media and data collection could actually help find people to engage with so they don't slip into suicidal spirals. I guess there is no profit in it, and history does show some scary chapters when such things are done by people with poor intentions / power motives.


> My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech.

In other words, you're saying no one should have input on it? There should be no rules at all?

Twitter is fairly unusual even among social networks, and different from most "normal" websites, in that it makes it relatively easy for random strangers to contact semi-famous people. Most of the time this is a great thing. But if you're annoyed by speech on, say, stormfront dot org, you can avoid it by not going there. If people are saying horrible things to you on Twitter, you can avoid it by blocking them - which works up until the point you become infamous enough among a specific subcommunity that a constant stream of random people show up in your mentions, most of them relatively innocuous (but annoying), some of them nastier than that. (And it's not like only misguided people have large numbers of haters - regardless of what you believe about Sarkeesian in particular, a look at mainstream politics is enough to refute that.)

Personally, I would prefer a decentralized social network where different subcommunities could use software to define their own interaction policies, much like the Internet as a whole. But Twitter is a centralized service; most users use the official apps (as is required to get the full feature list) and must rely on Twitter's centralized management to filter out both spam and abuse. There's no way around it short of a radical overhaul of the service.

I would support adding civil libertarian organizations to the mix of advisors, as a sibling comment mentions, for a variety of reasons. One reason is similar to why we have an adversarial system in law - if most people support an idea, such as free speech, in principle, but nobody is really dedicated to defending it and the easiest way to accomplish other goals is to compromise it, the slippery slope can easily become steep without people really noticing. Another is just that it's easy for these issues to be overpoliticized, especially when you have a physical presence in Silicon Valley.

But all that said, there must be rules. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe GNU Social will take off.


> In other words, you're saying no one should have input on it? There should be no rules at all?

I don't think any political organizations should have input. There are rules though, they're the local laws of Twitter's users. If a user posts illegal content then Twitter is obligated to take it down.

The potential beauty of Twitter is that you could in theory see the full scope of an argument, good, bad and ugly. What we have instead is a platform where people with controversial ideas can leverage agreement from within Twitter to censor opponents.

> I would support adding civil libertarian organizations to the mix of advisors, as a sibling comment mentions, for a variety of reasons. One reason is similar to why we have an adversarial system in law - if most people support an idea, such as free speech, in principle, but nobody is really dedicated to defending it and the easiest way to accomplish other goals is to compromise it, the slippery slope can easily become steep without people really noticing. Another is just that it's easy for these issues to be overpoliticized, especially when you have a physical presence in Silicon Valley.

You hit the nail on the head with this.

> But all that said, there must be rules. If you don't like that, go somewhere else.

Twitter must still adhere to at least US law. It seems like a good idea to not try to duplicate the legal system (minus checks and balances) internally.


> I don't think any political organizations should have input.

No organization is apolitical. Existing is a political act. To that end, the ones who are being shelled by your fellow travelers probably have some insight into the problems that your fellow travelers cause.


US law has virtually nothing to say about how Twitter chooses to run its service.


I'm pretty sure if I posted copyrighted material on Twitter and the rights holder issued a DMCA takedown, that Twitter would have to comply.

Any illegal content can and should be taken down. Twitter is trying to add another layer of judgement beyond that. That's what we're debating.


Revenge porn, where ex-lovers post intimate pictures of their former partners along with contact information, is also not currently against US law. Are you suggesting that Twitter is in the wrong to censor it?


>what should be an open platform for free speech

I absolutely disagree with the notion that Twitter "should be an open platform for free speech", at least in the "i should be allowed to say whatever I want without any consequences" meaning of "free speech".


Free speech means that there is no censorship, not that there are no consequences.


Just no consequences that Twitter is allowed to impose.


Twitter can do whatever they want (and they are) but it ceases to be free speech when they start censoring.


I think we're all at this point pretty clear that Twitter is not a "free speech" platform by your definition. I'm fine with stipulating that.


[flagged]


Bringing in a dossier on someone as extra ammunition in an argument? Over the line and not cool.


I disagree and I wouldn't call it a dossier. If someone takes a stance on a certain issue it is helpful to know why.

Edit: ...and I could have just the same pointed out to past comments on HN.


I think even bringing in a list of past HN comments would be over the line, though perhaps not as creepy. HN threads are supposed to be conversations, not courtrooms.


These were simply citations; adding context to someone's statement. I find it hard to understand that the information we all post freely online is creepy when we are confronted on it. Shouldn't we just stand by what we say?


Assembling a collection of someone's past statements to make them look bad is not "simply citations", it's a courtroom or political tactic, too aggressive for good conversation—i.e. for HN discussion—and because it breaches a boundary, yes, rather creepy.

You're not supposed to go around "confronting" people here. Let them add context to their own statements if they want to. Personal details or history shouldn't be brought in as ammunition.


This is a weird comment. I didn't assume the parent commenter was a GamerGate person. It is possible to dislike Sarkeesian and not be a GamerGater.

I "singled him out" because his was the first comment about this subject, and, at the time, the top comment on the thread.


Not a weird comment and you know why. I pointed to your comments about "GamerGate" because you singled him out with:

> The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games?

"Video games" being the focus there.


Stop moving the goalposts. The argument isn't "Thomas was totally unaware of the GamerGate debacle". It's "Thomas never accused this HN commenter of being a GamerGater, so a bunch of tweets about GamerGate aren't in any way germane to the thread".

You're the one who brought my Twitter feed into this discussion. That was a weird thing to do, but whatever; the real issue is that your argument doesn't make sense in context, except as a way of trying to generate extra drama. Instead of talking about the three examples of "radical" video game criticism, let's instead litigate all of GamerGate!

It also wasn't helpful to that commenter for you to suggest they'd been "singled out". Replying to the top comment on the thread isn't "singling someone out".


No goalposts are being moved. Your relevant history on the subject is what was being pointed out. I think you know exactly why and it doesn't have anything to do with "generating" drama.


It sounds to me like you're disturbed that I don't like GamerGaters, and so are inclined to dismiss anything I have to say about Sarkeesian. That's fine, but it's a pretty boring point to make, and it's not an actual argument, because it doesn't engage with the substance of what I said.

If you have a real point to make, do it directly, instead of by insinuation.


Actually was disturbed that you felt 'exstudent2 should craft the conversation around whatever you want instead of his valid points about who this new Twitter committee associates with.


I think if you reread the (now dead) thread, you'll see that's not at all what I did. My first comment on the thread didn't appear until after that commenter had already dug into examples of speech he found objectionable from Sarkeesian.

It's pretty clear to me where you're coming from now, so I'll leave it there. Thanks.


Interesting. It's funny that the comment where I mention Gamergate is sitting at -2 but all of my comments that address the points of the movement are ~+6.

I wish people would look into it for themselves instead of just hearing out one side/the media. That's really what my argument is about. When you silence one side of an argument, uninvolved people are apt to believe the unchallenged narrative.


The problem is that taking the thread in that direction is guaranteed to make the discussion useless, regardless of what opinion one starts with. A small number of people get furious with each other and everyone else rolls their eyes.

We don't need another eye-roller for the nth dozenth time.


I agree, I was hesitant to mention it. It's hard not to bring it up though when Twitter includes one of the main participants in their council. In this case I thought it was relevant especially since Twitter really does censor related material.


I understand, but maybe it's a relevant detail we should still abstain from. Or maybe there's a way to bring it up that doesn't lead to flamewars, though I doubt it.


If you post here long enough, you'll find that when certain topics arise there are a group of three-letter acronyms prevalent in tech that make rational discussion of said topics nearly impossible.


Wait until you quote the founder of a branch of a religion on the origin of their name and get down voted for it. I've pretty much stopped commenting in certain threads even to explain what each side is thinking. Its not really worth the frustration.

[edit: talk about confirming my beliefs]


Yeah, I just hate that this happens with some topics, especially where I can see validity on both sides but many people on each side have such a strong slant in the us vs them position that they simply dismiss anything and everything the "opposition" says.

There is a lot of discussion we should be having about the realities of protecting people from harm while protecting freedom of expression and much of the discussion is completely aimless now.

Also, out of curiosity, what name are you referring to? I must have missed something.


SDA in a political thread mention Dr Carson where we have some folks with some awfully weird ideas about his religion. I was a tad bit offended as I grew up studying SDA and Catholic doctrine (mixed household). I guess there are still acceptable prejudices. The downvotes on the post pointing out Carson would have the same problem as Romney was just relish.


> this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views

Then why did you introduce the topic, in violation of the HN guidelines?

Please take a good look at the inundation you triggered and don't do it again.


I was trying to respond directly to the question I was asked. So I know better next time, which guideline was I violating? Feminist Frequency is a council member so it seems pointing that out is on topic.


The one about classic flamewar topics.


Understood. It's a bit unfortunate that we can't practically discuss a company the size of Twitter adopting a very specific set of controversial political beliefs. I agree that there's probably no way to mention it without starting a flame war though.


All those samples seem like valid critiques of the portrayal of women in video games. How is this extreme or "aggressive"?


They aren't, mainly because it's painstakingly clear she hasn't played the games (or whoever writes her script hasn't played the games). She talks about what happens in the first 5 minutes and pretends that <female character that you cared about dies> is sexism.




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