An account was suspended
twitter.com
twitter.com
For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.
Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).
Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.
> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended
[0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229
[1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...
The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.
I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.
"Permanently suspended" seems both accurate and helpful -- it doesn't mean that the account can't leave that state, but that unlike most other suspensions, the account will not be unsuspended after a set period of time. The note that Ben posted explicitly says "you can submit an appeal", which would imply to most people the possibility of reversion.
You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter.
At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.
He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.
That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.
And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.
It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.
He's used to making these sorts of promises.
Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.
I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.
Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.
Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?
Ah, the bad old good old days...
Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.
If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.
It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.
Which rules did he break?
That's every company policy, ultimately. C-Suites and the like exist partially to do "exception handling" (or for all y'all Papists out there, "special dispensations")
"Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards.
It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.
Just "suspended" is not a good option at all, because it says nothing about duration.
"Permanently suspended" (with chance to appeal the suspension in the message) means exactly what happened here.
If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system.
One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.
"We charge $100 to have a human look at this case, if the suspension was incorrect we reinstate the account and your money. If not, we tell you what actions you can take that would un-violate our policies so you could be re-instated."
Spammers doing selenium powered spam would never pay for that, but the real folks who are not tight with large audiences would have an option.
Well yeah, it's trivial to file an appeal if you just have to click a button, but obviously that's not what I was talking about. Have they tried literally anything else?
Solve difficult CAPTCHAs, send a scan of your passport, pay a small amount of money (e.g. $1), put a large amount of money in escrow like someone else suggested, allow other well-known accounts to vouch for you, etc. etc. etc.
There's a ton of things you could do. It seems like they've given up without trying any of them.
Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.
Better to get it cheaper and less counterfeit/crappy the first time. Since delivery time from Amazon for non-Prime people has slowed to a crawl, it's a good motivator to discover best-in-class ecommerce sites rather than the mediocre-at-everything-but-sometimes-the-mediocre-thing-arrives-the-same-day-you-order-it site.
Sites that aren't paying the price of Amazon marketing, or charging an Amazon premium, so usually the prices are better. You might find that you usually use Amazon 95% of the time for just a few classes of product, and you're better served buying those from three other sites and leaving the last 5% of spontaneous purchases for which you don't have a good source with Amazon.
> AWS started political censorship
It is easy to see how this could happen. AWS Sanctions compliance team: ok, the government says we need to shut down Russian accounts, so we will lock any account using a Russian payment method. False positives can just call tech support to prove that they are not bots and have the offending payment method replaced.
Meanwhile over in support: Boss: remember it is corporate policy that a CSR may not make any changes to billing information for a customer’s account after the stolen cards incident.
Russian accounts are not banned. If anyone interested.
If you're running a business, you most likely need to meet people where they are at. Sometimes, your target audience are mostly on Facebook, then you most likely need to be at Facebook in order to reach them. Sometimes they are on Twitter, then you need to be there. Other times, you're doing something completely different, like running a restaurant, then you need to be visible on Google Maps/Tripadvisor, otherwise you'll lose out on ton of business.
It's really hard to just start a business without having any place for finding users for it, and sometimes the best place is Twitter but you're shit out of luck if you get banned...
Wow, that's a depressing thought.
I think I'd prefer to find a different line of business, if it were me.
Most people who run businesses opt for meeting people where they already are though.
It's almost every line of business. You probably need a mildly active twitter/facebook/instagram presence if you have a nice nail salon, or toy store. Anything not in a huge popular franchise.
edit: this sentiment puts me in mind of a watch or shoe repair shop guy in the 1960s who refuses to install a telephone because he wouldn't want customers who think that they could just loudly barge into whatever he was doing at will. Telephone culture brings a sense of unearned entitlement that attracts bad people. But you miss out on business worth far more than the irritation without a telephone. Keep the telephone outside the actual shop and hire someone else to answer it. They used to call answering machines "phone butlers."
If your customers are somewhere, you could be there too, and that often has the least amount of friction or is the easiest choice, so it's understandable why so many people elect to do it. But another thing you could do is bring them to where you are.
The trick is not to have a smart phone. When I'm coding I can pop in and out of Twitter. But then when I close the lid I'm unplugged.
That sounds like an amazing way to become slower and worse at programming...
I have a friend who is a minor public figure who gets taken down this way regularly.
Anyway if that's a pattern it might have something to do with that.
And of course the "purple app" that everyone is talking about (https://www.farcaster.xyz/) is incredible.
Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.
"Telephone is more detrimental to humans than radio ever was."
"Radio is more detrimental to humans than telegraph ever was."
On the positive side, internet has given us access to a lot of valuable information (for those who seek it out), whereas TV only makes available what the media companies want you to have access to.
I'm not going to say it was life changing, but it is stress that is now gone. Would highly recommend to anyone that has higher stress levels, it's possible SOME of it is coming from your social media use. In my case, it was work that was the big cause, but, removing myself from social media resulted in a noticeable improvement.
I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they are doing is contributing to their own stress.
Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it.
Same goes for meetings, ideally.
Spam, bots, fake stories, constant outrage. It's miserable but people seem to become addicted.
I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.
It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).
The account was suspended for 10 days and I'm still trying to get the app (separately suspended) that runs it unsuspended...
They must be going through some kind of crazy time over there between nation-state trolls, the Musk fiasco and the run-up to midterm elections. Yeesh.
If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.
The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert.
Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.
The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.
Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.
Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.
And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.
Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.
You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.
Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.
The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.
I need my own filter about what I see. Like:
1. I always want to read A.
2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.
3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.
And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.
Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.
I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.
[1]: https://notado.app
Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
I think their different goals make it easier (which is not to say easy!) to figure out an appropriate moderation style. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is easier to impose norms on an encyclopedia than a social platform. I don't have such a pithy summary of what SO is, but, as basically a knowledge repository rather than a social platform, it, too, can afford to impose certain norms that would stifle a social space. And yet, even with this head start, they can still face considerable flare-ups of controversy!
Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.
If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)
Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.
Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
To cite a particularly egregious example, I once saw a person banned for "giving medical advice" on /r/adhd, while not one, but multiple other moderators had also given medical advice in the exact same thread. A thread that was explicitly asking for medical advice.
Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.
Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...
On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.
Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example
> It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me!
-- https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583063313948499969
And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.
It's spam, so the account got suspended for posting spam. The fact that it was posted by Ben Thompson doesn't change the fact that it's spam. We can complain about automated moderation processes that make obvious mistakes all day, because it keeps happening, but this case doesn't look like an example of it.
The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way. It wasn't sending replies. It wasn't retweeting other accounts. It wasn't liking other accounts. It wasn't interacting with other accounts in any way. Should there be no accounts on Twitter that have a list of episodes of a program?
People follow these accounts because they want to be notified of new episodes. It's not spam, it's a service.
I tweet links to my blog posts on my Twitter account. Should I be suspended? What's wrong with external links?
Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? You may not need to worry if you have not.
I don't know, maybe? I tend to tweet along with Apple keynotes, for example.
My IP changes whenever I switch from wifi to cellular.
If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone.
I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in this thread are defending the punishment of the innocent.
There's actually no rule against bots on Twitter. In fact there are some accounts now explicitly labeled "Automated". The goal ought to be not "detecting bots" but rather "detecting rule violations".
"Permanent" is harsh. Maybe a couple hours of cooldown and a "did you mean to start a thread or post these hourly?" message would be a nice alternative.
I think he's angry that didn't actually carefully review anything.
Which probably means "careful" is one of those words that sounds positive but is legally meaningless, so corporations will abuse it shamelessly for propaganda purposes.
I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
We can't, but that's part of the propaganda game.
> ...maybe there's a process in which a report listing the suspicious signals is glanced at by a human auditor.
> I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
That's actually a good example of not being careful.
According to one EA Forum Moderator, there are actual people reviewing appeals, but the fact that they upheld my ban saying it was correct only to revert it 2 weeks after I stopped fighting them tells me their process is flawed.
My best guess is bans are handed out automatically based on whatever heuristic, but the human review merely checks the log generated by the automated system for rudimentary errors. Was my account the one flagged and not a different user by mistake? Yes. Ban upheld. (except not, when they gave my account back with no apology)
Not just that a human checked it, but a human carefully checked it. Humans are so often quick and/or sloppy that the word careful was needed even before the invention of computers.
To spice things up, all these services also stopped providing any kind of support regarding these kind of problems. Ever tried to get into contact with anybody about a banned account?
Just some weeks ago Discord decided to ban my 6 year old account out of nowhere. I didn't used Discord for 4 weeks, since I was on vacation. Also I am pretty sure, that it wasn't hacked, because I used MFA and no other account was affected.
I tried to contact the support, but only got a template response, that they don't talk about reasons and my account data will also be deleted in 14 days. I tried to contact them again, but they simply blocked my mail after that.
I didn't do any suspicious on discord ever. So I really had no clue why this happened. While talking with friends and coworker I've heard similar stories. And everybody of us changed their hardware multiple times beforehand (for example to test a specific component or for overclocking). Gotta love automatic banning systems...
I don't know what the solution is. I don't use social media (except HN, I don't know if it falls under social media category) and I don't feel the need to. It is super easy to not use Facebook, Twitter etc. But I have to use banks, insurance etc - there is no way to vote with wallet there, as almost every bank is as bad as the next one. I know of at least one college who post their class schedule, events etc only on Facebook, forcing their students to have a FB account. The level of stupidity...
I don't ever want to be trapped in a Kafka-esque trial by corporate automation!
There was a time when phone service, electricity, etc. was just an ordinary private company that you contracted with, who could do whatever private companies can do. Eventually, we placed these kinds of companies in a special category, distinct from ordinary private companies, where they were subject to special rules (in those cases where they were not taken over by the government outright).
Eventually, we will turn social media companies which are as large as Twitter under the "utility" category, and access to them will be subject to a process with all the bureaucratic checks and balances. It won't be perfect, but it will be less bad, on balance.
Also, like almost all utilities, its profit margin will be tightly regulated, and often it will run at a (taxpayer-subsidised) loss.
I think that your definition is not only spot on, but actually what social media platforms themselves interpret their role.
I'd love the see the faces of those 'free speech absolutists' if that ended up happening. If they thought Twitter censors too much now...
Suspended: Caused to stop for a while; interrupted or delayed.
You are permanently stopped for a while.
Unfortunately: Happening through bad luck
Through bad luck (not an intentional decision we are making), our policy prohibits that.
Unfortunately, your account has been permanently suspended.
> has been
"we didn't do it, it just sort of happened"
“Banned” is a negative word so we don’t want to use that. But we still want to ban you, thus “permanently suspended.”
It’s not a new trend as “made redundant” (ie, fired) and “focusing on value” (ie, cancelled your project) are all over press releases and public communication.
I think it makes me feel worse than just using plain language as it takes me more effort to figure out the meaning so I’m also frustrated by the fakery in addition to whatever the negative message is. Makes the speaker and organization seem stupid.
What I'm saying is "permanently suspended" isn't sugar coating what happened
This is entirely subjective, but to me saying "Banned" is terse, rough, and firm. It spits out like a slap.
Being "suspended" is temporary. It sounds more gentle, less gruff. (Almost) all kids have been "suspended" from a sport or activity because of something that they did, but they were allowed to play again after a short period. The catch is the qualifier being "Permanently" changes it to being a Ban, but it doesn't sound that way at first.
Language is silly. You can say the same thing in very different ways that come across more or less negative, and I think that's the same as what's happening in the corporate veiled speech.
OT but just yesterday I finally decided to join Discord fad for some open-source communities, but my freshly created account got instantly disabled after successful validation with email and phone, that without sending any message. Unfortunately I don't own a second phone number to register another one.
I better stick with my veteran ways - IRC, mail-lists, forums. Matrix is on my list to check.
They really don’t like Firefox though. Had a coworker get bitten by this recently.
Mozilla should sue them. Or start suggesting matrix.org when the user tries to visit Discord.
I think that's what PayPal is trying to teach me, where logins will randomly fail with an adblocker and 2fa enabled.
I occasionally get spam replies, but not very often. I just block the account, problem solved. I don't feel it affects my overall Twitter experience much. In fact, I'm vastly more annoyed by real humans who reply to me with insults. Or real human Twitter "influencers" who start quote tweet memes that everyone obsequiously follows, "spamming" my timeline with the same tweet over and over. In other words, IMO the humans are worse than the bots. ;-)
I'm not Twitter famous. I've got several thousand followers, which is significant but not huge. Maybe if you have millions of followers, bot replies are a much bigger problem for you. But then again, if you have millions of followers, nasty real human replies are also a much bigger problem for you. Fame is a no-win scenario, except just ignoring replies entirely.
If you use the reverse chronological timeline, you only see tweets from the people you intentionally follow. (I wouldn't advise anyone to use the algorithmic timeline, unless you're into masochism.) So I literally never see bot spam in my timeline. Spam isn't really affecting me. OTOH I never tweet about "crypto"...
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't make the experience worst.
I have a browser extension that hides trending topics, so I don't see that at all.
> tweets that end up in your time line for example
I just said that I use the reverse chronological timeline that only shows tweets from my follows.
> Or voting bots that reinforce the outrage culture.
"I'm vastly more annoyed by real humans who reply to me with insults."
> read any elo musk tweet responses for a sample
I've blocked that account.
> And bot oushing empty publication to hashtags
Why would you even read hashtags?
> Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't make the experience worst.
What I see on Twitter is my experience. It's largely your own choice what you see on Twitter.
I agree, and I do the same as you.
But driving in a certain way to avoid pot holes should not be a good reason to avoid fixing the road.
No, I'm saying that I doubt spam has much of an effect on the experience of most Twitter users. Email spam is probably much worse for most people.
[EDIT:]
1. I never mentioned ad blocking, so I'm not sure why 2 replies mentioned it. I mentioned blocking trends.
2. Even if you have trends, even if you have the algorithmic timeline, I think the replies greatly overestimate the effect of bots and spam on those. You don't see bot spam in the algorithmic timeline either. I also think "outrage culture" is mostly human culture, and we have plenty of genuine outrage even without any bots.
3. Even if you think (which I don't) that bots greatly affect the timeline and the trends, deemphasizing bot-like accounts in the timeline and trends is an alternative to suspending accounts. There's much less harm in algorithm adjustment than there is an account suspension, because false positive suspensions are very harmful to the account holder.
Though maybe they're looking for dead accounts to phish and break into?
From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is that Ben liked the content it was tweeting about.
Sure, I'd be annoyed too, but Ben's rage tweets just show to me that even the most rational among us become emotional when we don't get something want.
The account was not harming or annoying anyone. Does it even qualify as "spam"?
Is that useful account hard to disambiguate from a spam account? Yes, but that’s Twitter’s job here.
Look at email. People get tons of notification-only email that are little more than links. Email providers simply have to figure out how to block spam without blocking legitimate email, and they largely have. Social has the same obligation.
RSS, we miss you
It is shocking though how much much more blatant spam goes unchecked. Pretty much every tweet by popular accounts has a slew of crypto spam replies.
Ben Thomson should hire somebody to run his social media. Admin work of any kind will comes with hassles. A tech thought leader writing so childishly over a hiccup makes me question the value of his insights. But then I was never really sold on his writing to begin with, as it's a little too Economist-y. Nicely written, 30k ft view stuff for the managerial classes.
I guess the issue is that these conditions alone are now enough to warrant a ban 'on a technical level', when a few years accounts like that existed with no issue. Spam's a huge issue on Twitter, no doubt, but it seems like things are getting worse and it's fair to ask for some accountability.
Tweeting out links. So? One of the most basic use cases there are, for example a brand tweeting links to press releases.
From multiple locations. So? You mean like every multinational?
None of these factors have any smoking gun indicator to decisively and permanently suspend an account. On the other end of the spectrum we have a zillion crypto bots having the exact same avatar, name variations, auto-tweeting within the second of a main tweet being posted, and this is not spam.
Even if you find such entity "spamming" links, it still doesn't meet the more traditional definition of spam. Said account does not notify anybody, does not comment, direct message, it's just self-spamming.
I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.
I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.
Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.
More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.
Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when I asked them to remove the old wrong account, they were very nice confirming that they will do that. But instead they deleted my new account, with only the old account remaining. When complaining about that they ignored it, so I just deleted my old account also, and am a happy non-Amazon customer since.
> It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me!
-- https://nitter.kavin.rocks/benthompson/status/15830633139484...
It's a new account that posted 75 tweets in less than 20 minutes, all linking to the same website, and with high-profile names in the title of the tweets.
This looks like spam to me, I would have banned it too.
A human would have. He's just pointing out something to redirect the ire.
Specifically, that it says "careful", and yet a robot did the work, and presumably robots can't be full of care.
Why? Is a list of episodes inherently spam? What definition are you using?
I certainly wouldn't have banned this account
Careful review doesn't mean that a human reviewed it, just that a group of them were highly paid to implement the system of rules that banned him.
To me it sounds reasonable to ban an alleged spam account for a limited period e.g. 24h - spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do. An abandoned account can then be deleted.
Can anyone point out any obvious flaws in my reasoning?
Because that’s simpler?
> spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do
What makes you think they will not bother waiting 24h? If I were managing a spambots farm I guess I would rather wait 24h than go through the hassle of re-creating a Twitter account.
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of governing well. It could fairly be called the entire output of now risen and fallen civilizations. Institutions such as laws, rights, courts, judges, and citizenship are many millenia old, and people have always been willing to pay to get them. Yes, these digital empires are a new beast, but surely there are better options than running around, reacting to emergencies, helping out people with inner circle access, laying down really ineffective law for everyone else, like some sort of overworked bronze age monarch?
It makes more sense to me to see these people as overworked and laboring under bad ideas, than to see them as callous. There are a lot of competing considerations - security, legal obligations, this or that socially powerful group making demands! I don't think it's so much that they callously don't care as that they are so vastly outnumbered and can only deal with so many problems.
When the internet was young, we thought very little about security. Wide open telnet ports, http without any sort of certificates, software and websites laughably exploitable. As time has gone on, we have started to realize that security is a necessary part of the price of building something, and to factor it in. No one now simply throws a service on the web without making a serious security effort.
I feel like we're going through the same process with government. We learned, via hard knocks, that even tight knit communities can't get along without at least a moderator. Now we're learning that really big communities, comparable to nations, can't really function without some of the institutions that they have historically required. I hope that we will learn the lesson and price it in; right now, we seem to be in the stone age tarpit, the peasants angry at the government over injustice, the government angry at the peasants over constant demands that they can't keep up with, no serious solutions in sight.
Technology can certainly help, but automated systems are only the implementation of laws, which misfire, and which humans are so good at getting around and exploiting. What you want, when things go awry, are rights, a set of laws, and a series of judges to which you can appeal. We assume, by inertia and analogy with our physical spaces, that we have those things, but we don't. My hope is that we can start to understand these things are necessary, and like security, instead of complaining it is too hard, simply see it as part of the problem definition.
The vast majority of the obvious spam is almost certainly getting caught. Ben is making the elementary error only judging things based on what he sees (what makes it through), and totally forgetting to consider not what he doesn't see (the stuff that was blocked).
Being annoyed at the "after careful review" bit in a situation where no human review would have happened is fair though.
https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583163545268912129
"Deleting this thread for the usual reasons (don’t want to deal with noise and my point wasn’t clear)
FAQ:
•Account was not scripted. Everything was posted by a human
•A phone number was registered and a “Are you human” challenge was answered while posting
•Account is back
•What made me mad was the “After careful review” language. I felt lied to
•As always, never tweet"
The "Account was not scripted" comment goes against the assumption of a number of comments here defending Twitter's suspension.
(And the domain was available)
Or was that a later change?
Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.
Also, as others have pointed out, "suspension" implies that the interruption is temporary, so "permanently suspended" doesn't even make sense.
Although, it seems that the reality of the situation is closer to "your account is permanently banned unless you manage to raise enough fuss that an actual human looks at it."
Without centralization it's just some kind of trust network, and since the messages are open it's a much easier problem to filter away unwanted material than to deal with things like e-mail spam.
The reason people don't is simply that they want power over political discourse, so they accept what part of these problems are problems for them and are then happy for the other problems.
Also, who was banned from twitter because of their politics?
This is not true with decentralized services. If, for example, I have a Mastodon account and you want to follow me, we don't have to use the same service provider. You don't even have to use Mastodon software. You could use something else that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed or Friendica.
Twitter's business is promoting their platform to users, and making money off showing ads to them. Calling whatever automated joke that took place a "careful review" is lying about their platform, about facts material to one's decision to keep, or start, using it.
In other words, they are promoting their product using lies, no different than if they were selling cars, and claiming they had 4-wheel drive when in fact they have only 2.
This is fraud, a crime.
Other than cyber-utopian hype, social media sales pitches, and the human love for "a deal too good to be true...while it lasts", is there any reason to expect competent, reliable customer service from any large social media company which is based on free accounts? Let alone a company which shows ~no evidence of being able to break even (financially, over time)?
I suspect eventually this idea will catch on, and it will be perceived as monopolistic, at a certain scale, to couple data and UI, thus creating an unbreakable network effect. YouTube, Twitter etc
> Twitter management is a joke. @paraga doesn’t use twitter and hasn’t tweeted since July.
He's not included retweets in that, but this seems like a good point. How can the CEO not post his own tweets in the last 109 days?
Or do you all feel "well, the CEO is busy and has better things to be doing than tweeting"?
I have no doubt a lot of them are.
But it is possible it was reviewed by a human and an inexplicable decision was made.
I've moderated large forums before, the variety of misunderstandings and confusion a moderator can experience is nearly infinite ...
If you aren't already on a service that's eager about automated bans, don't start now. If you are, keep your head low. Just lurk. Maybe as more and more people lurk, Twitter et al will be incentivized to do something.
Then, why not just delete the account, why only suspend? What benefit is it to the suspended user, more importantly to the business?
Hear me out before you rage-downvote me. “Web3” most of all means a functioning identity model that is platform-independent, user-owned and thus scales the solution to the bot problem beyond the limitations of a single platform.
If you are in EU you have legal grounds for objection in Art. 22 of GDPR. Where it is stated "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."
I have not exercised this but out of revolt returned to my offline music collection for the time being.
You would be enlisted (by force) to be the first astronauts to visit the sun.
"Misleading Info Reporting Flow - Some of you can report Tweets for containing misinformation. This is currently available in limited testing to some people in Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, and the US, though we are exploring how to expand. These reports are reviewed and acted on independently from other Tweet reporting flows (e.g. for abuse), as this test flow is used to inform our misinformation-related strategy and operations. "
https://help.twitter.com/en/resources/addressing-misleading-...
If that's not your business model, abuse prevention is trivial. You can operate the network like a members' club where people gain privileges (such as posting links, media, etc - anything that can be used to spam or harm other users/the platform) over time as they prove themselves and acquire trust (Stack Overflow calls this number "reputation") and you can then use this trust number as a weight in automated decisions, so that high-trust users (who are unlikely to suddenly burn their hard-earned account) will not be impacted by an automated ban.
Forums in the good old days were ran by volunteers were able to deal with spam/abuse just fine with a combination of bans and privilege levels (it will take time & effort to level up an account to where it's able to post links/etc and be useful for spamming), there's absolutely no reason current social media companies can't do the same, if it wasn't for the fact that their business model to a certain extent relies on moderation being both unfair to users and subpar at effectively suppressing bad content (hint: bad content is nice to have around as long as it's not too visible, as it generates tons of outrage and thus engagement - it's only a problem when powerful people get wind of it and then you delete it and issue a fake apology).
There are ~21M questions on StackOverflow, which is equivalent to the number of tweets posted every a single hour and the number of items shared on Facebook every 8 minutes.
Just a question.
What's the true harm in letting even obvious spammers spam as much as they want on their social media profiles? Let them waste their time. Social media is a bit different than a message board where everybody is burdened by any spam that's posted because you have to follow somebody intentionally to see their idiocy on social media. If somebody wants to post 100 ads for viagra a day on some dumb Twitter bot profile, who is actually going to follow them other than maybe other bots? You really only have to worry about cleaning up the search results to ensure that the spam is hidden from standard searches.
The only person who should be upset about random bot spam on social media is the advertiser that might have paid a lot of money for loads of low-quality ad impressions. Well, doesn't it follow that the advertising payment system and business model is the real issue here, not automating spam detection? Somewhere in the process, social media has to ensure that advertisers aren't paying for bot impressions. It's not necessarily the spam itself that's the real issue.
I agree, profile spam only seems harmful to the search results.
Reply spam, on the other hand, is a big problem. But there was no reply spam in Ben's suspended account.
> Stratechery Interviews? NO TWEET FOR YOU
Pretty derpy take. People understand the math on this right? There are literally teams of hundreds or thousands of people who, day in and day out, are spinning up bots in the desperate hope that one will get seen by an actual user, and every once in a while, they break through.
On the other hand, if you say anything controversial to any audience, it's trivial to whip up a brigade of people to report the content, and when enough people report something, it's going to cause a suspension, at least temporarily, no matter how benign it is.
I just stopped using FB.
https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229
> For the record, this is a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world. So on one hand, I get it.
I think everyone can agree that Twitter's bot detection could be a bit more diligent, but what Ben describes seems like exactly the kind of thing an automated system should detect and ban without prejudice:
- A day old account
- A brand new account tweeting at a rate as fast as 1 per minute
- every tweet has a outbound URL
- while Twitter allows you to register automated bots [0] that use the developer's API, the StratecheryINT account apparently sent its tweets using the standard "Twitter Web App" -- e.g. likely an automated script using Selenium. If Ben had gone the approved bot route, I wonder if the account would've been sanctioned. As it is, faking web submissions probably triggers Twitter's auto detection even worse.
> Crypto spamming with Elon Musk's avatar? Not a bot! Stratechery Interviews? NO TWEET FOR YOU
As someone who's been an occasional reply guy to Elon over the years, I can say that the spambot filtering has gotten much better. Even when I send out a loaded tweet (i.e. mentioning "hacked wallet opensea NFT where can i buy the tshirt"), very few bots will show up, as opposed to dozens within the first 15 seconds.
I humbly submit that Ben hasn't looked in closely at what he thinks is bot activity. A lot of crypto spam tweets are either hacked legitimate accounts, or if relatively new, sent via iPhone/Android. Also a lot of spammy activity is actually real people -- a lot of humans don't take twitter seriously, or thoughtfully. Either way, all of this is much less obvious to filter out than how Ben describes StratecheryINT was operated.
edit: You can play the spam detection game yourself. Do a search "to:elonmusk url:https://\" and sort by latest [1]
For example, this @hameedforreal [2] account is almost definitely a crypto spammer, and likely was never a "real" person. But you can see that the account at least tweets from "Twitter for iPhone" (don't know if there's a way to fake that other than operating an actual iPhone).
If it's from an authentic single iphone (as opposed to a selenium script via distributed AWS), what would the very obvious and scalable heuristics be for auto-banning this account on tweet activity alone? The fact that so many of the tweets are replies with the exact same content? Well, there are a lot of real people who have burst activity like that -- think of fundraisers and activism. Avoiding false positives over millions of possible "bots" is very hard.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/twitter-officially-launche...
[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=to%3Aelonmusk%20url%3Ahttps%3A%...
Crypto spamming with Elon Musk's avatar? Not a bot!
When people on hacker news are literally shadow banned, have their comments hidden with zero feedback or notice.
In fact i guarantee this comment cant be seen either.
On HN, shadowbanning (i.e. banning accounts without telling them) is nearly always for accounts that don't have much posting history—either spam accounts or ones that show signs of having abused HN in the past, such as serial trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040389 has links back to a bunch of longer explanations, if anyone wants more.
p.s. After a quick look, I'd say HN's system is working reasonably well in your case because most of your good comments are getting vouched for by users, which unkills them, and most of your bad (for HN) comments are rightfully staying killed. There are cases of banned accounts that shouldn't stay banned, but this isn't one of them.
Ben Thompson being banned by Twitter is not an isolated event, it’s part of a larger assault on our human rights that is deepening ever more and more dangerously every day.