Elon Musk buys Twitter to bring back Free Speech

[Ayashe Ninetails]

11 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Hi, I'm on Twitter a lot. It's 1000x worse than people allude to in this thread.

Thanks for adding additional insight there. I agree - it's a lot worse than even I make it out to be. Especially if you DO venture over into Politics Twitter (which I do my best not to do often unless there's breaking news that directly impacts me).

I forgot to even mention the bot farms and doxxing and craziness. That's precisely the reason why I don't really get too involved much with that corner of the platform. Things are ugly enough on my side, lol.

Unless you actually use the platform, you really can't fathom just how crazy it all gets. Reading articles and reports from the outside is nothing - seeing someone's life get ruined before your very eyes in real time as some random blasts all their personal info to their thousands upon thousands of followers is gut wrenching. Ugh.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

seeing someone's life get ruined before your very eyes in real time as some random blasts all their personal info to their thousands upon thousands of followers is gut wrenching. Ugh.

On Twitter, that's just Tuesday.

They can't hope to moderate the platform and have started many programs only to quietly roll them back. Most of this is also performative so they can categorically state they are trying to solve the problem.

Twitter Safety is ass-covering in the same way a HR department is actually tasked with protecting the company from the humans they employ.

[AnthonyJoanne]

15 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

When it comes to moderating of social media it is about fair speech where each side or viewpoint is allowed it's say. Like as in not limiting the speech of those with alternate views like the Jan 6 protests being just protests rather then only allowing the voice of those calling it an insurrection by the unarmed participants of a political rally.

I always find it vastly amusing when these people drag out the "shouting fire in a theater" line and seem to think that they are making a telling point.

When the reality is that they are actually destroying the premise that they are arguing for:

People can't shout fire in a theater when there is no fire because ... it is against the law to do so.

People can't call for violence on social media because ... it is against the rules to do so. Every social media platform has it built into their rules, TOS, etc.

Which raises the question why many of those people who DO call for violence on Twitter don't seem to be penalised for it, if they have the proper political opinion.

Here's a few that were sparked by a deceptively edited fake news story pushed extensively by the media. People may recall it ... the Covington School Boys who were harassed by a Native American activist and a bunch of black supremacists:

I would put $1000 into a gofundme for someone to punch him right in the *****ing mouth.

LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT ***** TO THE GROUND.

Giving a *****-eating grin to a Native American's face isn't legally violence. But he is smiling *about* the violence. He is saying, "my people hurt you, and you can't touch me even while I gloat about it." It is fascism. And you should punch fascists.

I could list many more ... I won't bother. Most of the tweets were deleted when the low life scum whose initial response was to call for violence against school boys were confronted with the fact that those school boys were innocent.

What's really interesting is that some of those tweets are still on twitter to this day. And most of the people who did call for violence against those boys ... STILL HAVE THEIR ACCOUNTS.

Twitter has consistently failed to terminate accounts which have called for violence, because they chose to ignore their own rules.

And NOW we have people wittering about how twitter will become a forum of hate because Musk is buying it?

Hypocrites, one and all.

 

 

[Ceka Cianci]

4 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Thanks for adding additional insight there. I agree - it's a lot worse than even I make it out to be. Especially if you DO venture over into Politics Twitter (which I do my best not to do often unless there's breaking news that directly impacts me).

I forgot to even mention the bot farms and doxxing and craziness. That's precisely the reason why I don't really get too involved much with that corner of the platform. Things are ugly enough on my side, lol.

Unless you actually use the platform, you really can't fathom just how crazy it all gets. Reading articles and reports from the outside is nothing - seeing someone's life get ruined before your very eyes in real time as some random blasts all their personal info to their thousands upon thousands of followers is gut wrenching. Ugh.

That's a good lesson in not just handing out that personal information so easily , like a lot of people think is so safe to do on the intranets..

I'm glad I came in when it was still dial up days, just before High speed was coming around.. It was just close enough to  learn how risky the internet really is, then getting high speed and learning from people in places like MIRC  about just how really unsafe the internet can get and that you just don't hand that kind of stuff over..

I was fortunate to make some really good friends on there that taught me a lot and put the fear into me so that I wouldn't forget.. hehehe

Then the internet just seems like it got full of so many that thought it was this user friendly place where everything was safe to do ,like it was just a video game kind of safe place.. That hasn't ended well for a lot and still won't tomorrow..

It's crazy how much people put themselves out there.. like running a you tube channel from their house.. Seriously, just let ever creepo know right where they are and every aspect of thier life.. after the channel is gone, there they are all alone and everyone knows where they are..

Sometimes I just cringe when I see people do things like that..

 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

And NOW we have people wittering about how twitter will become a forum of hate because Musk is buying it?

Mainly because it would be an admission of futility to even attempt moderation.

Twitter is a forum of hate. It always has been.

Right now we have the carefully maintained perception, however incorrect, that you can report accounts that incite violence (or worse). Musk's Twitter promises a duck-it approach moving the emphasis onto verifying that people posting are actually people.

This fails as Twitter are broadly untrusted from all sides.

I have no desire to pay Twitter money for a "verified real person" checkbox as I don't trust Twitter with that information.

Other's have no desire to do the same as online speech can easily have offline consequences.

[kali Wylder]

22 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The left wants the state to have autonomy over everyone's body as well as the education of their children.

The right wants freedom from governmental interference.

Wrong.  It's the right that keeps passing the laws that interfere.  Take Texas and their abortion laws for example. Banning books is also interfering as well.  Once upon a time the right used to stand for less government but that hasn't been true for at least 50 years or so now.

[Arielle Popstar]

37 minutes ago, Aethelwine said:

Did that happen? I can't find a reference for it. 

There were the Audit accounts that got banned for platform manipulation. But you are saying a different reason so I am not sure who you are referring to.

One ban on Twitter last year was for Rebecca Jones the whistleblower from Florida, that was sacked for saying De Santis was manipulating the data from the Dashboard she created to downplay Covid figures for his political purposes. Again though that was for platform manipulation.

Donald Trump for starters when he was still the President at the time. He apparently was banned for these 2 tweets:

1. "The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"

2. "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/tech/trump-twitter-ban/index.html

[Arielle Popstar]

33 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do you see "alternate facts" the same as "alternate views"?

 Facts are facts but the debates are about their interpretation. 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

14 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

On Twitter, that's just Tuesday.

I'm going to hell. I laughed so hard at this. Because it's TRUE.

 

2 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That's a good lesson in not just handing out that personal information so easily , like a lot of people think is so safe to do on the intranets..

It's crazy how much people put themselves out there.. like running a you tube channel from their house.. Seriously, just let ever creepo know right where they are and every aspect of thier life.. after the channel is gone, there they are all alone and everyone knows where they are..

Well, in some cases yeah, it's because the people who were being attacked were well-known enough and made enough mistakes (aiming the camera out the window and showing too much of their street or somesuch) for others to go digging and find stuff online.

However, there are bots that do it, too. If you aren't familiar with the #TwitchDoBetter movement from not too long ago, the tl;dr there is small minority streamers were getting abso-freaking-lutely flooded by bots spewing racist and homophobic rants using special characters to get around the built-in moderation systems. Unfortunately, some of these bots were also armed with streamers' personal info (addresses, numbers, etc.) and would spam their channels over and over and over, blasting it out. Soooo, that happened!

Twitch did NOT A THING (gee, surprise?) about it initially. Individual streamers and their fans couldn't do much, either, as the bots would spam so creatively, taking countermeasures would require manually banning millions of letter variations. I think someone did finally manage to script a system to slow things down, but it took a few months for the hate raids to stop. Twitch now has a verified chat system a streamer can turn on, requiring a separate phone verification in order to use the chat at all. That seems to have helped, but MAN were they slow getting that rolled out!

 

[Coffee Pancake]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Donald Trump for starters when he was still the President at the time. He apparently was banned for these 2 tweets:

45 was banned for a systematically breaking Twitter's rules on an almost daily basis for his entire duration in office. He got as pass as Twitter abdicated their reasonability claiming it "in the public interest" (because it was in their interest to do so). Any individual tweet attributed to his ban is really just the straw that broke the camels back.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

One side of what? I don't know what a "woke progressive" is as my AAVE is quite limited (bad me), but my posts aren't addressing any of that. If you mean politics, then I have no idea. I pay exactly zero attention to any left/right whining on that platform. It's not even worth my time to read those comments on Twitter. My most recent post mentioned the gaming industry, for example. That's the Twitter community I'm most engaged with, outside of music, hobbies, some business, and art.

I've personally seen abuse and harassment in the areas of gaming, game development, streaming and YouTube celebrity fanbases, business, music, art, etc. I'm talking about mostly regular people here - not the big, massively followed verified accounts or anything. How Twitter chooses to moderate those is a mystery to me - perhaps it depends on how much is reported and how much influence a person has. Zero idea.

I can say I have not seen Twitter take any serious action against actual harmful bullying and pile-ons in the industries I've mentioned (where they seemingly happen frequently, if not daily - gaming especially). They might delete a few posts, maybe. Whole accounts - ehhh it doesn't happen that frequently.

As far as moderation goes - Twitter and other platforms occasionally contract with some outside companies to develop/train some AI bots to help with that. I've done a few tiny freelance projects that involved testing the effectiveness of some of these bots. They mostly suck (no surprise), but the bots aren't trained to spot political biases or anything. They're basic little things that will fail to spot toxicity if you try to get too sassy or sarcastic and can only really pick out direct insults (no surprise). Seems to be a complete waste of time for spotting anything but four letter words, really.

As for Twitter's manual moderation process - zero idea. One thing I DO know - some of the big big big accounts that have been banned had very good reasons for why that happened. Azealia Banks? Yeah I'm not sorry she got yeeted off the platform (though I think she's back now, maybe).

I don't know about the gaming section of Twitter but regardless, I am simply pointing out why Twitter likely had problems with a moderation system that worked since they were not interested in one that was fair and equitable to begin with.

[Rowan Amore]

40 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

At least one person posted that this apparently "one-sided" moderation was because only "one side" was breaking the rules so egregiously. Do you not accept that possibility?

That was the paper I cited earlier in the thread.  One side was posting more misinformation than the other.  Political and health related misinformation.  Kind of like what happened here in the forums.  

In case someone missed it earlier in the thread...

PsyArXiv Preprints | Is Twitter biased against conservatives? The challenge of inferring political bias in a hyper-partisan media ecosystem

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, Arielle Popstar said:

I don't know about the gaming section of Twitter but regardless, I am simply pointing out why Twitter likely had problems with a moderation system that worked since they were not interested in one that was fair and equitable to begin with.

There are not two sides to every debate, and no concept of fairness that can encompass all views.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

45 was banned for a systematically breaking Twitter's rules on an almost daily basis for his entire duration in office. He got as pass as Twitter abdicated their reasonability claiming it "in the public interest" (because it was in their interest to do so). Any individual tweet attributed to his ban is really just the straw that broke the camels back.

 

From what you and other posters have pointed out a number of times about the daily intercourse on Twitter, as well as some actual tweets from people who still have an active account, it is pretty certain that Trump came nowhere close to trash posting like some that are still there.

[Luna Bliss]

36 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

Twitter has consistently failed to terminate accounts which have called for violence, because they chose to ignore their own rules.

And NOW we have people wittering about how twitter will become a forum of hate because Musk is buying it?

Hypocrites, one and all.

It's one thing for a company to have participants who lack civility and common sense -- we all know they exist, on both the left and the right and every place in between.
It's another to have the actual leader of a company express a lack of civility and common sense.
The danger is much greater when one has power.
So no hypocrisy here -- just an understanding of how reality operates. 

[Luna Bliss]

13 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

48 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do you see "alternate facts" the same as "alternate views"?

 Facts are facts but the debates are about their interpretation. 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

39 minutes ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

Here's a few that were sparked by a deceptively edited fake news story pushed extensively by the media. People may recall it ... the Covington School Boys who were harassed by a Native American activist and a bunch of black supremacists:

I would put $1000 into a gofundme for someone to punch him right in the *****ing mouth.

LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT ***** TO THE GROUND.

Giving a *****-eating grin to a Native American's face isn't legally violence. But he is smiling *about* the violence. He is saying, "my people hurt you, and you can't touch me even while I gloat about it." It is fascism. And you should punch fascists.

I could list many more ... I won't bother. Most of the tweets were deleted when the low life scum whose initial response was to call for violence against school boys were confronted with the fact that those school boys were innocent.

What's really interesting is that some of those tweets are still on twitter to this day. And most of the people who did call for violence against those boys ... STILL HAVE THEIR ACCOUNTS.

Twitter has consistently failed to terminate accounts which have called for violence, because they chose to ignore their own rules.

And NOW we have people wittering about how twitter will become a forum of hate because Musk is buying it?

Hypocrites, one and all.

What next, Twitter won't let us post about punching actual, verified totally true Nazis?  That would stink!

[Arielle Popstar]

8 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are not two sides to every debate, and no concept of fairness that can encompass all views.

What an asinine cartoon to post.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

From what you and other posters have pointed out a number of times about the daily intercourse on Twitter, as well as some actual tweets from people who still have an active account, it is pretty certain that Trump came nowhere close to trash posting like some that are still there.

My understanding is, the issue was in part because of Trump's influence. He was the "leader of the free world". I could be wrong, and often am.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I don't know about the gaming section of Twitter but regardless, I am simply pointing out why Twitter likely had problems with a moderation system that worked since they were not interested in one that was fair and equitable to begin with.

Curious what you're basing this part on exactly - and who is the side who would benefit in say, the cooking community or entertainment or travel blogging or whatever random area of Twitter someone hangs out in?

I mean, if you have a food blogger (random example) getting harassed by a reader who is super big mad that she's not using enough baking soda in her recipe and launches into a tirade about it and followers her all over the place tweeting mean tweets about her (hey, stranger things have happened on there) - which is the side that would benefit by Twitter's supposed one-sided moderation policy?

Twitter is massssssssive (not to mention hugely international). Politics isn't the only thing going on over there.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

What an asinine cartoon to post.

Your own cartoons are golden, keep it up! Thanks for being a responsible Forumite.

[Luna Bliss]

8 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

From what you and other posters have pointed out a number of times about the daily intercourse on Twitter, as well as some actual tweets from people who still have an active account, it is pretty certain that Trump came nowhere close to trash posting like some that are still there.

Arielle, really?   He attempted to, and still wants to, overthrow democracy!  Do you not understand the danger we're in here?

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

which is the side that would benefit by Twitter's supposed one-sided moderation policy?

It depends on if Twitter has a baking soda manufacturer as a major advertiser.

Hey, Second Life should start selling ads! Pop-up ads! With embedded auto-start videos!  Then they can lower tier fees.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

My understanding is, the issue was in part because of Trump's influence. He was the "leader of the free world". I could be wrong, and often am.

You're probably right except that obviously he didn't have a lot of power if an overpaid social media moderator could not only cancel his tweets, but ban him permanently to boot. So much for a US president being the "leader of the free world".

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

However, there are bots that do it, too. If you aren't familiar with the #TwitchDoBetter movement from not too long ago, the tl;dr there is small minority streamers were getting abso-freaking-lutely flooded by bots spewing racist and homophobic rants using special characters to get around the built-in moderation systems. Unfortunately, some of these bots were also armed with streamers' personal info (addresses, numbers, etc.) and would spam their channels over and over and over, blasting it out. Soooo, that happened!

I only heard about the misogamy in the gaming community, not racism and homophobia.