[dmix]

That's a very vague statement which doesn't explain why it's a phenomenon frequently occurring with republican accounts. Besides it's very easy to create rules and only enforce them selectively, then just dismiss criticism with "we're just enforcing the law": as we've seen with over-policing in black communities and excessive probation in sentencing. Why not be more specific? They also said:

> “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.”

So is it a problem with Twitter or not? What code are they "shipping" to fix this? What type of "behaviour" gets you shadow-banned? How is it enforced (by humans at Twitter, manually reporting by users, machine learning, etc)?

[toomuchtodo]

Twitter is under no obligation to be transparent about underlying fundementals of, or report on, their internal platform integrity efforts.

Isn’t that the same argument we’ve talked about with “less desired” platform participants? Their platform, their rules. Free speech is not a requirement there.

[dmix]

Free speech not being a legal requirement doesn't mean it shouldn't be a goal strived for by private companies creating critical communication platforms used by hundreds of millions of people. There were very good reasons why humans started championing free speech and free press. The utility of those fundamental ideas isn't limited to just governments, so I don't know why we should give Twitter a pass simply because the constitution only applies to government...

Not all good, valuable ideas have to be enforced by law either. We can create strong social pressure and promote ethical company culture in silicon valley and push (legitimately) liberal values. We can also make market alternatives, delete accounts, push for boycotts, investor activism, create value-based industry organizations, etc to put pressure on them economically.

[toomuchtodo]

I fear those ideals are beyond what we’re capable of at this point in the societal evolutionary cycle.

When the carrot fails, you fall back to the stick. Twitter didn’t use the stick first; it waited until the interactions on their platform turned into a shit show first.

[strken]

Free speech and transparency are ideals, not just laws. It's not unreasonable to hold a platform accountable for its ideals, even if it isn't doing anything illegal.

On a more pragmatic level, if they're standing in the way of political speech by elected politicians without transparency, those politicians will eventually decide to legislate against Twitter.

[dragonwriter]

> Free speech and transparency are ideals, not just laws

Yes, and the ideal is that individuals will be free to express themselves both by creating content and in choosing whether and how to distribute content, whether their own creation or others.

> On a more pragmatic level, if they're standing in the way of political speech by elected politicians without transparency, those politicians will eventually decide to legislate against Twitter.

That retaliation, unlike Twitter's action, would violate both the ideal and the Constitutional law of free speech.

[toomuchtodo]

Elected politicians aren’t entitled to free speech on a private platform. Attempts to legislate against Twitter would result in a Supreme Court escalated case with the legislation in question being sent back to Congress.

Remember, only the government is required to permit free speech. They cannot compel private parties to do so.

[ZainRiz]

Most likely this is an AI/ML bases system that is doing Natural Language Processing to determine if an account is exhibiting "bad behavior"

That means first they identified many badly behaving accounts, trained their ML model to auto-detect other accounts behaving badly, and then banned them.

Of course, these ML models are famously hard to decipher.

The implication?

Twitter could choose to mention the criteria they used to select the original set of accounts they used to train their model (most likely it was accounts that had been manually banned in the past, these would have been bans which went unnoticed by the media) but they can't say "our model auto-bans accounts which do X, Y, and Z" because the logic used by the ML models is too obscure for any person to understand.

[GW150914]

That's a very vague statement which doesn't explain why it's a phenomenon frequently occurring with republican accounts.

Well if we put aside conspiracies and the like, then the answer is because there is a correlation between antisocial behavior and “prominent Republicans” on Twitter. I don’t know if that’s the case, but based on who calls me a “spic” most often when interacting online I wouldn’t be shocked.