Twitter Software Helps Find, Ban Users Advocating Violence

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
38,744
With U.S. and European governments pressuring social media giants to take a more active approach to taking down illegal, harassing and violent content, Twitter has announced a new software based approach. In a report aimed at shining light on the process of how accounts are taken down, they noted that they suspended some 377,000 accounts during the final six months of 2016, 74% of which were identified through internal automated software. By contrast, last year Twitter reported only about 1/3 of accounts taken down were identified through automated software.

It's not all positive news though. Twitter also noted that in the last six months of 2016 they had received 88 court orders and other legal requests to take down accounts of legitimate registered journalists and news outlets, 77 of which were from Turkey. Twitter did not take action in the "great majority" of these requests, outside of Turkey and Germany. Twitter filed legal objections whenever possibly, but in Turkey, none of these objections prevailed.

All of this comes at the same time as Google has been struggling with unfortunate placement of sponsor content on extremist sites and videos. Twitters attempts highlight that it is possible to find a majority of this content through algorithmic means, but "a majority" may not be enough, when it only takes one instance to thoroughly piss off your sponsors, which begs the question: When you have a global user base larger than can be effectively moderated by any size of workforce, and algorithmic methods are imperfect, as they will always be, how do you solve the problem?

In Turkey, Twitter said it withheld 15 tweets and 14 accounts in response to court orders. Examples included gory images after militant attacks, the company said.

In Germany, Twitter said it took down one Tweet posted by a soccer magazine "for violating an individual's personal rights in response to a court order."

Twitter said it was providing copies of the underlying court orders to Lumen, a research project affiliated with Harvard University that collects and studies cease and desist letters and other court orders about online content.
 
Censorship is on the rise. People need to be protected from "bad thoughts". Thank goodness for Twitter and Google!

Twitter has never been a freedom fighter for the people. They are a company making money and everything else is secondary. On the otherside, twitter really is just an angry cesspool of users always raging about something. Not that censoring and blocking posts will improve their image only change its shade. The amount of death threats alone from twitter is staggering, however empty they typically are, needs curbed but by force likely will just make it worse. The user base needs to improve, you can't force it.
 
But, Darunion, forcing it is just what they appear to be trying to do: forcing it through censorship.

Death threats should be dealt with in accordance with the law. But other forms of speech? I don't think censoring it is the right thing to do.
 
Agreed. I really don't know how to fix it. The internet will turn any medium into a perverse and angry place where decent discussion cannot thrive. It really is why I spend a lot of time here, the discussions are more interesting and thought provoking.

I mean I have had a `9yr old kid tell me over voice that he f**cked my mother. Back on xbox when you could rate users. Maybe that is what twitter needs, just a rating if you piss enough users off they just slowly make you go away lol.

Kind of like when I am playing WoW, and some kid goes on about how awesome he is and everyone else is an idiot and then you see him get voted out of the raid, and now we don't have to listen to him anymore. Maybe give the control to the users, yes it will be abused but then twitter isn't going to look like some giant muzzle.
 
Yeah, in the old days of WoW, before the whole mega/multi-server thing, if you were a jerk in groups, word got around and people would blackball you. Still, I think that most gamers were better behaved back then just because. I think there was more of a "us against the world" mentality that helped breed cooperation and helpfulness amongst players, both in-game and out of it. I think our society has changed since then, and the kinds of people, and the kinds of things people think are okay to do, have declined into a lowest-common-denominator sort of way.

I don't use Twitter (or use Google very much), but maybe some form of user-defined blocking would work, or maybe allow the user to pick words or phrases which, if sent to him, would be automatically sent to a garbage file (much like email servers do these days). But it needs to be the *user* that makes those decisions, not some corporate entity. That's my view, anyway.
 
Agreed. I feel like people now feel more invulnerable on the internet than they used to. Which is not the reality.

Back when I used to chat and rage, it was on irc, there was no facebook or myspace where people could sift your photos to find unintentional pieces of info leading them to your actual house.

It's like the matrix, people will swallow control much easier if they believe they are the ones in control. :D
 
Censorship is on the rise. People need to be protected from "bad thoughts". Thank goodness for Twitter and Google!


Well, for the likes of Google it is about survival.

They need a way to detect unsavory content, so they don't wind up putting their sponsors names on it, or they are quickly going to wind up without any sponsors.

Who wants to buy "Ford, the preferred brand of the KKK" or "Dawn Laundry Detergent, Brought to you by Al Qaeda".
 
Well, for the likes of Google it is about survival.

They need a way to detect unsavory content, so they don't wind up putting their sponsors names on it, or they are quickly going to wind up without any sponsors.

Who wants to buy "Ford, the preferred brand of the KKK" or "Dawn Laundry Detergent, Brought to you by Al Qaeda".

I would screenshot and meme that sh*t so fast it would make their headspin if I saw that LOL
 
Well, for the likes of Google it is about survival.

They need a way to detect unsavory content, so they don't wind up putting their sponsors names on it, or they are quickly going to wind up without any sponsors.

Who wants to buy "Ford, the preferred brand of the KKK" or "Dawn Laundry Detergent, Brought to you by Al Qaeda".
I agree that it's a shame that some people can't separate ads from content. But without content, there wouldn't be anyone looking at the ads. And if I know someone censors their content, I will largely avoid going to their site. Of course, I'm just one guy, and others are not so picky about such things...
 
I just hope the bans are politically agnostic. I seem to remember that not being the case so long ago...
 
I would screenshot and meme that sh*t so fast it would make their headspin if I saw that LOL

Once, back in the early 2000's there was an automated script type ad ion googles search engine. It would take your keyword search, and turn it into an "find <keyword> cheap on eBay".

Well, I happened to be searching for statistics on child labor, so I got an eBay banner aid that said "Find Child Labor Cheap on eBay".

I could have sworn I screenshotted that for posterity, but I just can't find it.
 
Censorship is on the rise. People need to be protected from "bad thoughts". Thank goodness for Twitter and Google!
The problem is that its not even handed though, as you have mainstream liberal celebrities and media outlets promoting violence against conservatives and it gets a free pass.

Now we should absolutely target physical threats of violence, but that is not twitter's responsibility, that is the government's responsibility to investigate and prosecute when laws are violated. If the FBI wants to have a "fast pass" channel to request deletions of stuff from Twitter for illegal threats, that's fine, but we don't need "Ministry of Truth" departments saying that people can't report migrant rapes and what not because it might vaguely "foster discriminatory backlash" and so insist on censoring stuff that goes against the agenda of the day.
 
Maybe twitter will bleed enough to die. Theyve banned my favs, so i dont need it anymore
 
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social media outlets definitely need to up their game when it comes to hate speech and violins.
 
Agreed. I really don't know how to fix it. The internet will turn any medium into a perverse and angry place where decent discussion cannot thrive. It really is why I spend a lot of time here, the discussions are more interesting and thought provoking.

I mean I have had a `9yr old kid tell me over voice that he f**cked my mother. Back on xbox when you could rate users. Maybe that is what twitter needs, just a rating if you piss enough users off they just slowly make you go away lol.

Kind of like when I am playing WoW, and some kid goes on about how awesome he is and everyone else is an idiot and then you see him get voted out of the raid, and now we don't have to listen to him anymore. Maybe give the control to the users, yes it will be abused but then twitter isn't going to look like some giant muzzle.
Why wouldn't it be abused. Instead of insulting them, give them a low rating campaign. A rating system wouldn't do anything unless you filtered out low rated people. The new attack will be rating people low to silence them.
 
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social media outlets definitely need to up their game when it comes to hate speech and violins.

We have to have a zero tolerance for violins!

VOH-Heil-Hitler-Violin-Weinstein.jpg
 
Better watch out for those spicy opinions you dont agree with.

As far as I'm concerned, everything goes, in the realm of debate, as long as threats of violence, doxxing (as a method of allowing others to make violent threats), and the like are not used.

I also don't care for name calling rather than rational debate, but I don't think people should have their accounts removed for it.
 
I feel that it should allow conversation from all sides, but attacking a person or advocating violence should be eliminated. Like the Soapbox at [H], it's not a free for all. There are limits. Just don't censor opposite opinions. Even the KKK. As long as it's not advocating violence or other things that aren't legal, the KKK has every right to speak their opinion as much as the next guy. I know at some points, it'd be a thin line, but it'd be a person making the final decision. And that's on them.

Name calling? Fucking mothers? Welcome to another day on Xbox Live.
 
Name calling? Fucking mothers? Welcome to another day on Xbox Live.

If you ask me, that's another good reason not to have consoles. :p

Even most multiplayer PC games are unbearable these days, without just muting everyone.

When I helped admin the top Red Orchestra 2 server on the internet, we took an active admin role to police that shit enough so that it was actually an enjoyable place to play the game. This just resulted in some of the people who got banned, throwing hissy fits and buying DDoS attacks against our server, to the point where it died off, because the player base got tired of the frequent interruptions.

This is why we can't have nice things.
 
So...pretty much every anti-trump "Twitterer" and riot...excuse me "protest" organizer should be gone soon then right?
 
If you ask me, that's another good reason not to have consoles. :p

Even most multiplayer PC games are unbearable these days, without just muting everyone.

When I helped admin the top Red Orchestra 2 server on the internet, we took an active admin role to police that shit enough so that it was actually an enjoyable place to play the game. This just resulted in some of the people who got banned, throwing hissy fits and buying DDoS attacks against our server, to the point where it died off, because the player base got tired of the frequent interruptions.

This is why we can't have nice things.

When I joined a BF3 server a while back from the [H] folks, it was great. Tons of fun, great sportsmanship, and just a perfect game. That's how I'd love to see it go. People that love to play the game and have a good time. Stupid people screw it up for everyone else.
 
When I joined a BF3 server a while back from the [H] folks, it was great. Tons of fun, great sportsmanship, and just a perfect game. That's how I'd love to see it go. People that love to play the game and have a good time. Stupid people screw it up for everyone else.

FB_IMG_1490244817928.jpg
 
Twitter has never been a freedom fighter for the people. They are a company making money losing money at a heinous rate, never having made any at all, and everything else is secondary to censoring people they don't agree with.

FTFY

Maybe next year if they add 50 million more bots they might turn a profit.
 
Back
Top