Twitter is “shadow banning” prominent Republicans
news.vice.com
news.vice.com
https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter
dat://fritter.hashbase.io/
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.
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.
(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.)
> “I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account behavior not the content of Tweets.”
> “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.”
So is it a problem with Twitter or not? What code are they "shipping" to fix this? What type of "behaviour" gets you shadow-banned? How is it enforced (by humans at Twitter, manually reporting by users, machine learning, etc)?
Isn’t that the same argument we’ve talked about with “less desired” platform participants? Their platform, their rules. Free speech is not a requirement there.
Not all good, valuable ideas have to be enforced by law either. We can create strong social pressure and promote ethical company culture in silicon valley and push (legitimately) liberal values. We can also make market alternatives, delete accounts, push for boycotts, investor activism, create value-based industry organizations, etc to put pressure on them economically.
When the carrot fails, you fall back to the stick. Twitter didn’t use the stick first; it waited until the interactions on their platform turned into a shit show first.
On a more pragmatic level, if they're standing in the way of political speech by elected politicians without transparency, those politicians will eventually decide to legislate against Twitter.
Remember, only the government is required to permit free speech. They cannot compel private parties to do so.
Yes, and the ideal is that individuals will be free to express themselves both by creating content and in choosing whether and how to distribute content, whether their own creation or others.
> On a more pragmatic level, if they're standing in the way of political speech by elected politicians without transparency, those politicians will eventually decide to legislate against Twitter.
That retaliation, unlike Twitter's action, would violate both the ideal and the Constitutional law of free speech.
Well if we put aside conspiracies and the like, then the answer is because there is a correlation between antisocial behavior and “prominent Republicans” on Twitter. I don’t know if that’s the case, but based on who calls me a “spic” most often when interacting online I wouldn’t be shocked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It starts with a perceived axiom, or an intuition if you like: People are very different inside. Although the difference between the best people and worst people is very large, anyone can improve themselves through reflection and thought and listening to the ideas of people better than themselves.
But logically, not everyone does so. Some people are much smarter than others. And some are much more moral than others. Also, if listening to good people can make someone better, then listening to bad people can make someone worse.
This makes certain kinds of people very dangerous. Smart but immoral people can easily influence less smart people and convert them into immoral people too. In fact this is almost sure to happen if smart+immoral people speak and are listened to, because the vast majority of the population is pliable and easily persuaded. They decide how to vote by reading newspapers and even tweets. If bad people have access to a platform like Twitter, then their badness will spread like a virus.
But we don't want people to become bad. We want them to become good. That means it's important to ensure that only good people have platforms on which they can speak and be heard. If we don't deny bad people platforms, then that is itself a form of immoral behaviour, no better than not washing our hands and spreading germs that way. We wouldn't spread physical illness so we shouldn't spread the mental illness of immorality either.
What is immorality? Well, a strong sign someone is a bad person is that they argue against obvious and simple solutions to important problems. They dissemble and prevaricate and may even try to block implementation of solutions. Republicans seem to often deny and fight against solutions to important problems like healthcare, or the plight of refugees from the third world. Whilst they have justifications, they often seem indirect and slippery, like "this change will make things worse rather than better because government is incompetent", although that's hard to believe because smart and moral people are often attracted to public service (smart and immoral people are in contrast attracted to profit-seeking endeavours).
Therefore Republicans seem immoral, but they keep winning elections so they must also be smart. Smart + immoral = dangerous. If they can speak, they might brainwash good people like my friends into becoming Republican too, and that would be terrible, because how will we cure cancer and solve hunger with Republicans in charge?
So - the only good and moral thing left to do is find ways to suppress their speech. It's for the greater good.
In fact, it's key to the liberal marketplace of ideas and exactly the behavior freedom of speech and the press exists to support.