There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template.
Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?
What tools do people use to administer these? Since Twitter and other platforms seem to have no interest in fixing the problem I figure I might as well stop trying to abide by their ToS and leverage the technology for my own agenda.
What needs to happen is that they open up all the blocked account information for all users, and show when users that are blocked by X many users have deleted tweets.
The problem defined is that Twitter allows viral communication to occur in Humans, but which is being exploited in a very specific way by a small group of people who understand how to spread dissonant ideas by intentionally using polarized, meme-based arguments, which themselves are viral in nature. It's like a logic "jingle" you get stuck in your head. Or a virus.
It's on Twitter to fix the Pandora's Box they have opened with this type of infrastructure. (And I'm still sticking to my claim that Twitter is infrastructure given how much it can govern our behavior.)
OK, but any ideas on the tool front? I'm not being facetious, I've just decided that since it's a de facto free-for-all I might as well retaliate against bad actors rather than waiting for people to grow a conscience.
If you're seriously asking: for the most part the tools are in-house. There isn't a single widely used framework (to my knowledge...) that covers everything. Basically, you'd use a mix of something like redis, beautifulsoup, digitalocean, ansible, a fleet of shady proxies and various middleware for everything. Throw in postgres too.
If you're not using the API, all you're doing is programmatically signing up for accounts, storing the corresponding login credentials, writing a little library that assigns all outgoing bot activities to a user-agent and proxy, queues their activities and executes them. Naturally you have a little library that manages the random profile information creator - collect CSVs from data.gov such that you can create convincing random names and addresses, then use random profile pictures from Google images.
The secret sauce is not in the orchestration (someone could wrap all this up into a framework pretty easily), it's in the structuring of activities so that you don't get caught by e.g. having your bots follow each other incestuously. That's a rather less automated process and require active vigilance and tweaking.
What I have seen work in the past is partitioning the botnet such that blocks of them slowly establish signal to noisy credibility in specific niches before intermingling. Many botnet creators attempt to create a multiplier effect, recursively improving their aggregate signal score by having the bots in a massive echo chamber with each other. This is easily caught.
Bot block A should have a few thousand from around the country commenting on the election and sometimes posting memes from reddit. Bot block B should retweet thinkpieces from the tech industry and be the first submitter of various obscure but passable Medium articles. And so on, and so forth. Basically, have the bots act like humans who mostly talk about one category of thing on Twitter, but who still have enough nuance to not seem spammy.
Once your botnet hits a critical mass, you no longer need to do this as strictly in the future. You can spin up new bot blocks quickly and have the mature blocks retweet and interact with them to bring them up to the requisite signal score more quickly. At this point you can capitalize on trends and have a credible mass of followers influencing a conversation on Twitter within hours or days of the trend emerging. As it snowballs, you compound the other blocks to simulate rippling popularity throughout the system (i.e. trends become less about one niche and more about everyone, like Uber->Uber's Sexual Harassment Scandal->Sexual Harassment).
The other secret sauce is in successfully managing the network on a budget, because while all those proxies are what diversify your botnet's origins, individual proxies typically score negatively for websites actively looking to reduce bots.
"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up)
I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..
You know, I could see ol' Zuck sitting there in his Herman-Miller Aeron chair looking at the internal numbers of FB 'users' and seeing the number be ~15 billion accounts that their in-house 'bot filters still think are 'real' people. He says to himself: 'You know, maybe I could tell the UN that there really are 15 billion people out there and they are all on FB. Ha, I mean, a lot of people really might believe me.' He looks out the window, sighs, and puts out an email via Thunderbird to the marketing team leads that says to keep the number at 2 billion.
Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.
"Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product", this is easy to answer. Investors.
Investors who don't care about nothing but vanity metrics, investors who don't make CEOs accountable. This is why, twitter is not the exception.
Sorry, but this explanation makes no sense. $TWTR has been a public company since 2013, with investors who emphatically do care about things other than vanity metrics.
A list of the largest Twitter shareholders[1] includes Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley etc. These folks really don't care about "engagement metrics", except as proxies for revenue.
This argument can hold for earlier-stage companies with investors hoping to sell at inflated valuations to a greater fool later in line, but once you've been publicly held for several years, it's quite a stretch. Whatever's hurting Twitter's ability to fix its problems, it isn't "investor pressure".
Interested to see how penalizing accounts for 'repeatedly tweeting at non-followers' is going to work when most of what I see on the platform is people messaging celebs who don't follow them back
This is what I was going to post, seems to be about 90% of the activity on twitter. They seem to only care about the experience from the perspective of the haves, anyone else just isn't part of the conversation.
One of the main problems with Twitter is people sign up and don't know what to do with it - except message famous people. If Twitter prevents the plebs from shouting at the intelligentsia then it will make the platform even more irrelevant. The last time I used it, it was like talking into a void and that was with hundreds of real followers.
So much for the strategy of tweeting at a company to resolve consumer disputes. Normally, I would say that's a good thing, but sometimes these companies just don't respond to non-public channels. Google, for instance, is notorious for making it difficult to reach an actual human in customer service.
That got me banned a couple of weeks ago. I wrote an application that recommended an event to the user once he\she would tweet "I am bored". I made the mistake by giving providing a fall back once the location could not be determined. This lead to ~40 tweets with identical texts. Twitter quickly pulled out the banhammer.
The listener is a pretty much off the shelf Tweepy listener writing into a Redis queue. For the recommendation is comes via an API where I can't share the code.
>Except when Twitter makes that a heuristic for detecting bots
There are several dozen. Maybe not turned on in prod, but that's a whole another story.
In fact, within three months of joining, way back in 2012, one of my very first tasks was to write a standard datamining job that would compute the difference between the GPS location during office hours (9-5pm) and the GPS location during home hours (7pm-7am) of everyone who tweets. A histogram of those differences would tell you about the commute distance of the average American who tweets. You could then bucket by region and say interesting things like the average NY tweeter commutes 25 miles more than the average CA tweeter.
Looking at the results we got, it was clear there was a substantial percent of bots, because their location varied so widely, minute to minute hour to hour. Haversine of GPS diffs will be reasonably stable, because your IP maps to the GPS ( we used the standard Maxmind geoip2 API) , and those IPs are relatively stable....Except if you are a bot and switching IPs willy-nilly.
This was just one instance, but there were several such projects...usually interns and new employees would work on these to get their feet wet, and then move on to more substantial projects.
Provenance of data was not in scope, 'twas more of a standard datamining "see if you can dig up something interesting" project.
Like I said, there were scores of these - one of my colleagues wrote the famous soda vs pop thingy which once again put location stats to good use- http://blog.echen.me/2012/07/06/soda-vs-pop-with-twitter/
With quantitative analytics being used and abused by ever more businesses, the advantage will go to those that can apply qualitative checks to their assumptions - and scale it.
Are you suggesting to get a Gmail account, turn on the setting that makes Twitter email you notifications, mark tweets as spam in Gmail, and then use Google's spam detection as an existence proof of a solution if it's successful?
It took them years to let users upload images (when there was a clear demand and parasite services grew out of this) and there's obvious spam accounts that could've shadow banned with very simple heuristics.
There are enough people talking to each other to make it interesting, at least for me. But the issue that most people are having is political nuts who just go around doing a search for "Donald Trump" or whoever and then abusing anyone who said anything remotely critical. Even worse are the actual white supremacists who do that or worse.
The bots are a problem as well, but they aren't what runs people off the platform.
That sounds like an informal description of a heuristic to flag accounts as potentially abusive rather than a specific rule with a specific punishment.
So because I see no reason to upload a photo my 7 year old twitter account is now considered second rate whereas the bot account created last week is not because it was updated to upload a random profile image.
Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.
Today, the egg, tomorrow, unverified account names. Are they going full Facebook?
And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that's ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don't necessarily like is part of being an adult.
Having concerted bombs of right-wing harassment drop on one's head for having the temerity to do something like "be a woman with political opinions" is not part of being an adult. And that's the reality of Twitter right now.
This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.
The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation.
As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them.
Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?
> The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real (as in tangible) physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation.
Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.
Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.
Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.
The harassment from Twitter is everywhere on both sides of the political spectrum though. You're painting a very one sided picture. I'm not attacking you here I'm just saying there is a narrative about the "alt-right" harassing the innocent leftists and it's not the whole picture.
I'm a (democrat) mixed race woman, and I get more harassment and vitriol from "tolerant liberals" when I post anything remotely in support of the president than I ever do from "white supremacists or anti feminists". I have noticed if I don't go right down the party line on an issue, I'm attacked violently. The "N" word I get called frequently is Nazi, not the other.
I'm not trying to say your experiences are invalid, I believe you're experiencing it, but I think assigning it to one political party or movement is inaccurate. It's really just the culture of Twitter, and maybe society in general.
Yeah, the thing that's probably ultimately going to limit the life of Twitter's latest automated anti-abuse measures is that left-wingers who fire nasty, vitrolic, vulgarity-filled tweets and invitations to kill themselves at users on the right are also getting their accounts automatically put in time out or even suspended for it, and they're getting really pissed off about it. Sooner or later the press is going to get hold of a sufficiently sympathetic example and that'll be it.
If Twitter wants to show the alt-left tools the door too, I'm certainly not gonna cape up for them. But there is a difference of orders of magnitude in both size and cohesiveness to wrestle with here, and it's not towards the burned Bernie bros. That alt-left doesn't have members of state-blessed media outlets (well, until recently, when cheering on pedophilia became a little too much for them) on campus tours where he'd out trans people with a pack of jackals ready to pounce.
You're kidding right? The right says a lot of stupid things...ok TONS of stupid things, but "left leaning media" isn't one of them. These media outlets may not be state blessed, but we have the media on our side, and we have our Jackals for sure. 99% of the media is leaning hard to the left on everything.
The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt, and he was targeted and destroyed by the jackals of the left.
Bill Maher was the arguable catalyst of it, and he said the exact same thing Milo did, and WORSE things in support of pedophilia and we didn't call him out for it. No media blitz, not cancelled events/shows/etc. Nope, Maher is a hero!
All that does is show the "values" we exited Milo with were not true because we don't apply those values to our own people.
The media does not have a "hard left" bias. They have a "hard profit" bias. The most recent example is the 2016 election, in which they used an orange haired fascist and a right-leaning, conservative "new Democrat" to amplify their entertainment driven ratings (and ad revenue).
1) I don't believe what you said WRT to Bill Maher, and I don't even like him or watch his show.
2) People who don't like Milo, don't like him because he's a bully who encourages other people to doxx, harass, and otherwise target people who don't look or act the way he supposedly approves of. Also, most of what he does is just posturing for attention. If Milo found a way to make more money and get more attention doing offensive stuff for the other political "team" he would have.
3) Name one incident from the "left" on Twitter or elsewhere that stacks up to GamerGate, or the Leslie Jones harassment. It's not that they couldn't do such things, but it doesn't really fit with the way the Left likes to roll.
Bill Maher isn't a hero and is largely considered in the circles I run in to be the trashfire alt-left sort who I'd be happy to see the back of. He is emphatically not "my people" and never has been. So I'm not really sure what you're getting at there.
Yiannopoulos got a little more attention, which he wanted, because he decided to spend a lot of time being a scumbag to get people to look at him. And it bit him because that attention unearthed some real bad stuff. Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".
>Bill Maher isn't a hero and is largely considered in the circles I run in to be the trashfire alt-left sort who I'd be happy to see the back of.
Curious. Looks like there's a lack of clear definitions here, because when I hear "alt-left" (or "control-left" as Maajid Nawaz likes to say) to me that means the SJW types who are quick to accuse anyone they disagree with as being a "bigot" or whatever. Maher seems pretty firmly against that.
>Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".
Not really worth curating all the questionable left-wing folks major outlets have on staff or let write editorials, but it does seem odd to cite Yoo, here, since arguably that would be an example of the NYT trying to be objective and let you hear the otherside instead of just telling you what to think (FWIW he seems to be a Trump critic, so that aligns well with the NYT editoral board right now). I prefer the former.
But there is a difference of orders of magnitude in both size and cohesiveness to wrestle with here
The most non-snarky way I can put this is: "Citation needed".
Something that is a left leaning/liberal phenomenon almost exclusively from my experiences is the propensity for shouting a statement into public, and then claiming that anyone who has the temerity to reply to their tweet with anything other than wholehearted agreement is "harassing them", and then immediately blocking them.
The right leaning/conservative types tend to argue back with you, perhaps using strong language. Conservatives tend to call you an idiot libtard sheep, liberals tend to call you a racist sexist bigot.
(This is one of the benefits of being centrist: both sides don't like you.)
This happens when replying to liberal leaning commenters with such regularity that I have taken to mentally rewriting "harass" to "disagree" in the context of Twitter.
I've been blocked and called a harasser on Twitter for calling shenanigans on a comment in a much more gentle way than I did above. Have I just harassed you? Twitter's community, and increasingly, their management, would say yes.
I relate to this 100%. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but in the last 2 years the culture has changed so drastically, I am being pushed to the center. I'm not alone in this, and it's bad for democrats. They don't realize it just yet.
The over use of "Bigot", "Racist", "Nazi", etc completely devalue the words. They take away their power. 10 years ago nobody wanted to be called a Nazi but now people laugh it off. That's dangerous. We want to be be afraid of being called a racist. We want to discourage it.
When Suzy soccer mom says she wants some stricter vetting for refugees she's not the same as Billy Bob sitting in his cabin planning out the burning of black churches. But the left has gone full throttle in that direction. They take the easy path of calling someone a name rather than defend their position, even if it's perfectly defensible.
These loud voices are drowning out the moderate, reasonable people on the left, and pushing them away. This is a bad long term strategy.
>The over use of "Bigot", "Racist", "Nazi", etc completely devalue the words. They take away their power. 10 years ago nobody wanted to be called a Nazi but now people laugh it off. That's dangerous. We want to be be afraid of being called a racist. We want to discourage it.
Baffled me to watch Americans stumble into the exact same mistake the Brexit Remain campaign did. Calling people nazis and racists for having what they believe are moderate opinions does not make them sit back and re-evaluate it instead just solidifies their stance and they begin to shrug off being called racist.
> When Suzy soccer mom says she wants some stricter vetting for refugees
I don't disagree with most of your post--but in the land of the real, it is very difficult to say that vetting for refugees in the United States is not already an intensely strict process. The people asserting it's not are self-described nationalists who wish to stop immigration...or are sourcing what they're saying from them. That's where the meme (in the original sense of the word, not the 4chan sense of it) comes from. Your hypothetical soccer mom is getting this from dog-whistle sources because she listens to them and can hear the frequency. In today's political climate, that is basically a lost cause. The epistemic closure is real; you're not clawing that person back. (Some of them--myself included, years back--will eventually find their way out. But you gotta want it and nothing anybody outside the bubble does or says will make it happen.) It's not a fight to turn people, and to be honest I don't think throwing good money after bad makes sense. (I advise ignoring these people entirely, not trying to argue with them or teach them because you don't have the hooks into that person that the news sources they choose to pay attention to do.
Instead, it's a fight to turn our people out. And I'd agree that picking on randoms doesn't help turnout. But one thing I'd caution about is that what you're saying is very frequently extended to everybody not merely randos. "That literal fascist is a literal fascist, he checks all the 'what is a fascist?' boxes and he's down with Richard Spencer" still needs to be said. Though I'll decry my liberal forebears' willingness to use the word to mis-describe earlier generations of Republicans. Because we are in a real bad place and the literal fascists are actually at the gates. And in the White House.
(The deeper concern, and that's why it's a turnout fight, is gerrymandering by overwhelmingly right-wing/Republican/there's-not-really-a-difference-anymore groups in order to crack and pack those who don't vote for them. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish...)
>but in the land of the real, it is very difficult to say that vetting for refugees in the United States is not already an intensely strict process. The people asserting it's not are self-described nationalists who wish to stop immigration...or are sourcing what they're saying from them.
I see your overall point, but the problem with the assertion here is Suzy's opinion is WRONG, not just different and it must be wrong because of where she gets her information. So you take that and then amplify it a little and you get "Suzy is a Nazi" and that's where everything breaks down.
Suzy may not be wrong, and may have a valid opinion based on her own personal research or experience but that's unacceptable to the left of today. Everything is absolute and if Suzy doesn't agree with it, she is wrong and watches too much Fox News! Dog Whistles! Gaslighting! Facism!
It's not just the left that does this of course, but as a member of the team I feel disenfranchised when it happens.
> I don't disagree with most of your post--but in the land of the real, it is very difficult to say that vetting for refugees in the United States is not already an intensely strict process.
Agreed.
> The people asserting it's not are self-described nationalists who wish to stop immigration...or are sourcing what they're saying from them.
Here I disagree. A big chunk of it is people who think that nothing bad should ever happen, and if any refugee ever does anything bad, that proves that refugees are not adequately vetted, and we have to do something. They may then listen to the self-described nationalists, but that's not where they start.
And it seems to me that writing off all the people who disagree with you is not a winning strategy. (A whining strategy, perhaps, but that's not the same thing...)
You're going to have to persuade them, or you're going to have to live with them (and their votes). And you don't like the consequences of their votes.
> Because we are in a real bad place and the literal fascists are actually at the gates. And in the White House.
Yup. At least as advisors. (I'm not willing to place Trump himself in that literal category, at least not yet.)
> A big chunk of it is people who think that nothing bad should ever happen
Those people may exist. I don't think, if that's their base axiom, they are practically (in a world where we have scarcity of time and effort) reachable. Convincing somebody to change their axioms is...well...not a particularly good investment of time.
> And it seems to me that writing off all the people who disagree with you is not a winning strategy.
This is pretty much what Republicans have been doing for a very long time, and doing pretty well at the levels that matter (i.e., state legislatures and Congress). They have not tacked to the middle, they have not tried to drum up moderate voters. They've kept their people and they have whipped them into a frenzy to vote to the point where gun-to-head obstinacy (the debt ceiling comes to mind) is a positive that rewards them even when moderates are aghast.
Turnout fights aren't won from the middle. You can have the occasional figure who appeals to the middle--Obama, I think, is one such figure--but I don't think that is replicable at scale. And the problem is at scale. There really are more of us than there are of them; ours just don't get out and vote. (And there are efforts by the party in power to make that continue.)
> At least as advisors.
To be clear, I agree. (I don't think Trump has a political position. I know Bannon and Miller do.)
> I don't think, if that's their base axiom, they are practically (in a world where we have scarcity of time and effort) reachable.
On reflection, I may have to agree with you here. It's an emotional axiom, not a rational one, and so you can't fix it by rational argument. (You might be able to fix it by emotional argument, but I'm not sure even that would work, nor do I know how to go about trying.)
> This is pretty much what Republicans have been doing for a very long time, and doing pretty well...
But it seems to me that the Democrats (or at least the left wing of the party) has been doing the same. The message has been, if you don't agree with us, you're a racist, sexist bigot, and you should just shut up and crawl in a hole (or die). And it turned out that (pick one): The Republican base was bigger, or the Democrats alienated more people, or the Republicans alienated them less.
> There really are more of us than there are of them; ours just don't get out and vote.
If by "ours" you mean Democrats (as opposed to centrists), then I'd say that Hillary was a very uninspiring candidate. Also, when the DNC chose to hinder Bernie, it turned off a lot of Democratic voters.
> I don't think Trump has a political position.
I don't, either. I hope that's good news - if Bannon and Miller prove to be political albatrosses, Trump is somewhat likely to jettison them. (The bad news is that Trump, not having positions of his own, is more susceptible to the positions of those around him.)
IMO, it's not what the left is doing that's the problem, though I'm not a fan of it. The problem boils down to:
The repeal of campaign finance-> Lots of state legislatures going hard Republican-> New laws to limit voting rights and more gerrymandering
You can argue that one side needs to stop tone policing all you want, but the reality is that candidates are losing in states they used to win because the people who were voting for them aren't allowed to vote anymore. [edit] Most people who vote aren't listening to most liberals or whoever in their day-to-day conversations about this stuff anyway.
Also, when I see the media going crazy over Kellyanne putting her feet on the couch to take a picture, I can definitely see one of the biggest factors in how we've lost our way.
>Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.
To be completely fair, they will remove people for blatantly racist/sexist/homophobic tweets, and often do, where "f* white males" talk is completely allowed there.
> I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.
> Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.
> Stop normalizing evil.
Your rhetoric is very emotional, and you want to use "abuse" a s an excuse to ban people who simply disagree with you ("anti-feminists", really?). I don't think people who share your views should be given the power to control discourse[0]. It's funny that you insult the "alt-left" ("bernie bros") when many would define the alt-left as the regressive left, in other words those who want to ban people simply because they disagree, like you're trying to do.
[0]: especially since you could argue that Twitter is the #1 platform for political discourse in the US, and is therefore vital for free speech (not as a legal obligation, but moral principle).
These people have always existed. They will continue to exist. They will continue to find ways to harass the people they see as easy targets because they find enjoyment in it. Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.
For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play.
You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
> You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
This is analogous to all those arguments that "If you have nothing to hide, you have ", or, "If you want privacy, you always have the option to become a hermit and live completely off the grid with no contact with friends or family" What if I want privacy and to participate in modern society? Why should I have to choose?
It's the same here: Twitter, for all its faults, is very useful. Why should I have to choose between not using it and enduring a bunch of abuse on it, if Twitter can fix that? To protect the "right" of some anonymous shitheads to have victims be forced to listen to their harassment? Please.
You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.
> Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.
First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level. But even if it were true, it would not be a reason for Twitter not to attempt anything. Again, you're starting from entirely the wrong premises here.
>You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.
Show me an example of where I said this. What I've been saying is that attempts to programmatically weed out this type of behavior and the accounts that people create to perpetuate it will ultimately be ineffective. What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?
>First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level.
> What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?
"We can do something, but it won't be completely effective, so we shouldn't do anything."
What's the use in vaccination? After all, it doesn't completely eliminate disease. Unless used very consistently for a lifetime.
Well then what exactly are you saying? From what I can see, it's either: "what Twitter is doing is useless so they should do nothing" or "banning people is bad because they'll continue to be abusive". Neither of these seems like a good argument to make.
I'm saying a "safe space" on a public (as in anyone can sign up without being vetted in some way) online service is not possible. Full stop. I never said twitter shouldn't do anything and I never said banning people is bad. To come to those conclusions based on my comments shows either a lack of reading comprehension skills or simply approaching them with your own biased predisposition that anyone who disagrees with you in some way disagrees with you in every way (an unfortunate and disgustingly common occurrence these days).
I'm suggesting to people who use these services that they should tamper their expectations about what can be done. Twitter will never be a "safe space". Can it be safer with some effort on their end? Maybe, but don't ever expect it to be a platform free from judgement about the beliefs you share, nor will it ever be free from those who would threaten or harass you for having those beliefs.
I agree with this 100%. These types of people have been around for centuries, the only difference is now they have a mouthpiece and encouragement. Use your block button, it's free.
One quibble: the block button is not free, it takes time, and we have limited time. Say, 60 presses/minute? When you have 3000 harassers, including many bots, is it worth spending nearly an hour blocking them?
There are third party tools that make the block button cost less, but it would be even better if they were built in to Twitter, and even better yet if the bot networks were not allowed.
Not OP, but I definitely have -- it's unbelievably annoying to deal with.
I had tweeted something pretty innocuous to a journalist after the election. I wasn't screaming about an illegitimate president or anything of the sort, it was something like, "Maybe we should look at adding more members of congress, it would smooth out the electoral college and make for better representation."
Several months later, some random right-wing asshole with 50,000+ followers retweeted my comment and said something like "Hillary supporters just won't get over losing!"
Within minutes I was absolutely inundated with his moron followers / bots. Literally hundreds of responses calling me a butthurt Liberal and going through my old comments so that I couldn't just block that one.
Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time? None of those people followed me, they knew nothing of me or my politics, they just blindly chase whatever signal their 'leaders' choose to amplify.
>Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time?
I can't, because in such a situation I would just delete my account. Spending your time responding to or blocking and reporting all of them would be maddening, for sure, but that is what gives them their "power". It's easier to click only one or two buttons and just be done with it all. Let them have their little victory. Don't let some app be the doorway through which people can try to hurt you.
Giving up an identity, followers, and communication streams and starting from scratch is giving them a full victory, not a "little victory," that's their entire goal, the big deal. Sometimes the right thing to do, but it seems rude to give it as blanket advice.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago -- don't define your identity or personal value on a public online service. It will always, always come back to bite you in the ass in one way or another.
A fun way to pass the time, yeah. A way to keep current with what's going on in the real time, sure. But the more personally invested you are in such a thing and the more you open up your private life and thoughts to strangers, the more devastated you will be when things go south.
I think we're talking about different things here. I mean to refer to an online identity, a way to talk to people about a certain topic. It can be professional, commercial, political, or personal. Many people have several online identities, to talk about different topics, and they're not attached to the personal side at all.
Of course, even if it's not a personal identity, that's not enough to stop certain people from attacking the Twitter user's personal life.
You seem to be arguing to not use Twitter, which is just fine, I don't think it's necessary at all in my life. But I think a lot of people find a lot of value in the platform, and when there's something of value, I can see why a lot of people would rather try to keep Twitter useful rather than just abandon it entirely.
I don't use twitter, but I've heard and seen that there is a way to turn your account private, so only people you follow can tweet you. That seems like a much more proportioned solution to getting spammed by tweets, than outright deleting your account.
This particular issue seems ripe for a technological fix from Twitter. It should be possible to tweak your privacy settings in such a way that you can turn down noise and only focus on the tweets you are interested in. Maybe it's just my naivete as a non-user, but it seems like adding a couple of settings would help you weather such a storm:
- allow tweets only from people you follow
- allow tweets only from people you've already tweeted at
- temp-block all non-followed accounts that tweeted you in the last X hours
I think asking Twitter to fix the much larger problem of "eliminating assholes from the Internet" is counterproductive. Twitter's inherent design is flawed as it is essentially a single loud public forum, but they can at least provide you tools to handle the worst cases of spam.
This post reveals a pretty significant misunderstanding of what Twitter is for marginalized communities. And, as such, this conversation is fruitless.
But one last thing: if it's as abhorrent as you seem to actually think it is, stop caping for them as being something that can't be stopped. Because you help them by doing so.
>This post reveals a pretty significant misunderstanding of what Twitter is for marginalized communities. And, as such, this conversation is fruitless.
Okay, then please, "educate me". I'm not being sarcastic, either. I'm a middle class straight white man and I will freely admit that I don't understand the plight of many minority groups, and certainly not in the context of twitter or other social media. My beliefs are not set in stone, and I have never been dismissive of someone who has the desire to share their experience with me so I have a better understanding. Regardless of my understanding, though, I'm pretty sure I will still feel that removing oneself from a harmful environment is a pretty effective tool, regardless of the type of harm being put upon you.
What I see more often than not in this situation, however, are responses that are dismissive instead of educational -- like saying the conversation is fruitless. I have seen conversations like this come up before, where the "right wing" side, being much less moderate than I am (and I consider myself to be pretty liberal for the record), opens themselves up to learn more about the situation only to be met with responses like "I don't have time for this" or "educate yourself", which is about as effective as telling someone to RTFM. Only the manual is about someone else's beliefs and feelings, and it doesn't actually exist.
So please, if you have the time, tell me what I don't understand.
OK. I apologize for the tone of my comment; most of the time when somebody says what you said, they aren't looking to learn. And that's why people often respond with "educate yourself": because, in 2017, asking to be taught is often a rhetorical and political trap used against activists and marginalized people (how fucked is that?). It is a request for emotional investment that is used intentionally and maliciously by the white-supremacist types to do what I can only describe as gish-galloping at scale. Ask questions, get people who actually care about stuff to give a shit and to expend effort and emotional energy...and then burn it, "I was trolling you the whole time", that sort of thing. As you noted, these people don't have much to live for and wasting their time is okay if they waste other people's time. That's a victory to them.
The common response is "well, do it anyway," but the solution isn't for marginalized communities to be saints. It's for people like you and me to educate ourselves and work on this shit. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of AlterNet-type stuff, but this one encapsulates what I'm trying to say here: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/black_people_are_not_here_to...
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A good place to start with regards to why social media matters with regards to marginalized groups (and it's really the obvious one) would be something like Black Twitter; it's a strong, pretty well-defined cultural group that discusses, at a wide and large scale, topics related to being black in America. It's a hugely influential cultural phenomenon and in a lot of ways it serves as a baseline political organization tool for those communities. The idea of telling marginalized people that they should refrain from participating in what is effectively the common social discourse among young people in 2017 because of their literal enemies who troll and harass specifically to make people not participate is...it presses some big red buttons in my head, because (also as a white dude) our space for "common social discourse" is pretty much anywhere we sit down, and that's not the case for others.
If you were Twitter, why on Earth would you want the accepted answer to anybody's problems to be "don't use Twitter"? Your entire business model is built around getting people to use your service.
And that's the problem that twitter needs to come to terms with and attempt to resolve, not the end user. I personally don't have faith that it is a solvable problem, at least not while still remaining an open platform. As long as anyone can sign up, "undesirables" will be among them.
The end user has precisely two options -- use twitter or don't. If using it causes you too much mental anguish, and twitter is incapable of making the experience better for you, then don't use it.
> And that's the problem that twitter needs to come to terms with and attempt to resolve, not the end user. I personally don't have faith that it is a solvable problem
So your advice for Twitter is to throw up their hands and close down their business?
I mean, it's easy for those of us outside the company to say "your product is fundamentally unfixable." But if you're inside the company, and the product as-is has giant problems that are keeping potential new users out and driving existing ones away, you have to try something. Your job literally depends on it.
Maybe the things they're trying now will work, maybe they won't. But as long as Twitter has employees and enough cash on hand to pay them, "just tell people to not use Twitter" is not advice anybody there is going to consider useful.
>So your advice for Twitter is to throw up their hands and close down their business?
When did I start giving twitter advice? Nothing I've said in any of my responses in this thread was a suggestion of how twitter should operate their business. I hope they can get rid of all of the objectionable content and that everyone can be happy. I just don't think it's possible, and that the benefits of using twitter don't outweigh the abuse some people take, so it's not worth using.
The fact that you're not forced to be on Twitter means that victims can leave, but it also means that bullies can be banned. Why prefer the first option?
I'm not preferring either option. Of course they can be banned. But they will come back. They always do. Why subject yourself to that continuous cycle of stress?
The real question to ask is: why are some of these political nuts working so hard to push people off of Twitter? The answer, in my opinion, is because it allows people they don't approve of the same public voice as themselves, for the first time ever in many cases.
> including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me"
How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?
Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.
What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.
What if engage means "I want to blow the whistle on something, can you get me in touch with a journalist?" for 0.01% of blocked messages and "u suk vote yrump" for the rest?
> maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them
could have fooled me because if you built a platform purely for harassment it would resemble twitter closely
I believe what he was getting at is as an adult, you should be able to realize that a website on the internet is just that--and have the ability to take it with a grain of salt without being highly offended / outraged.
I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.
And the point is that disagreement isn't what runs people off that platform. It's abusive behavior by large groups of people (and sometimes their bots) towards whoever they don't like.
Do you think Twitter should have a shared default blocklist?
That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big).
Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.
I think shared blocklists are great. As defaults, probably not. I don't use any shared lists because nobody's going to take a serious run at me, I just don't want to spike my blood pressure seeing the egg/anime smurf accounts well-actually at me.
But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.
Sure but harassment isn't. My understanding is that all of this is optional. As long as anonymous accounts are not abused there's no reason to filter them out. If anonymous accounts are abused people will filter them out. Thus the only people we have to blame are the abusers of anonymous accounts.
Please show me an intelligent left-wing and an intelligent-right wing person, both of consistently post well reasoned and well argued content from their perspectives.
It doesn't matter what side they are on, all that gets shared on twitter that would qualify as political is absolutely nauseating waving that sides flag and telling the world how stupid the other side is.
It would be better if it was blocked, preferably by default.
Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.
That's a lot of tweets(5+). Did you get them all at the same time, or did they have some kind of randomized delay? Also uh...what's the benefit of spamming you out of Twitter and into Snapchat? Do people get $$ for views of their snapchat images, or something?
No mention of how filtering might apply to Twitter's trending algorithms. Since much of the activities of bots are aimed at pushing a narrative to a wider audience (getting it trending), it seems like Twitter is currently neglecting one of the most serious harms that bots pose to the community.
I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use/account abuse.
I see Twitter is getting harder and harder to use anonymously. As someone living under a totalitarian government that is tightening its grip everyday on free speech and the internet in general, this worries me.
Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible.
I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.
What I don't understand: Why doesn't twitter take moderation seriously? On reddit it's left up to the moderators of each sub. It does very. But having a very "up to interpretation" but yet not politically biased set of rules and enforcement is great.
We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.
I'd love them to take moderation seriously, but it couldn't scale and there's no natural "partitions" between communities of interest with different norms, so you can't delegate it to users. They've only just managed to deal with the most high profile example of "brigading".
Dammit. I thought I could now remove any tweet that had the word 'trump' in it[^2], which meant I could refollow a bunch of people and make twitter much more useful, but it seems that it only works for notifications in which you are mentioned[1], which means the feature is pretty pointless, at least for most people.
[1]:https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032
[^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don't want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.
Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter's demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted.
I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there...
Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.
Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?