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by ambulancechaser 2693 days ago
I wouldn't consider it humiliating. And there's a dimension this doesn't talk about: false positives. Twitter has to make an actual decision to ban an account. When they get this wrong, they have unhappy users and I'm sure articles would appear here about the terrible work they are doing. These researchers pay none of those costs about false positives. Perhaps they have a 7% false positive rate and consider that pretty good. That amounts to about 12,000 legitimate users banned.
1 comments
adriveatrain 2693 days ago
Some of Twitter's users are more equal than others when it comes to bans. I don't think they are concerned about blowback from false positives from spam accounts.

e.g.

"Learn to code" was tweeted at me by a sketchy account. I reported it as abusive behavior as part of targeted harassment. Twitter suspended the account within 20 minutes.

Journalists if they tweet "learn to code" at you don't stay silent, take a moment to report it. https://t.co/RXgqqV2ptw

— Ben Popken (@bpopken) February 1, 2019

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untog 2693 days ago
I wouldn't consider that a typical example given that the whole "learn to code" thing was a targeted harassment campaign. Not difficult to imagine that in that timeframe Twitter had prioritised investigating and banning users who were participating in it.
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adriveatrain 2692 days ago
They didn't extend such protections to schoolchild Nick Sandmann

"#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper"

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untog 2692 days ago
Probably because there was no coordinated harassment campaign, and he isn't even on Twitter. But sure, keep up the false equivalence.
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adriveatrain 2692 days ago
Who was co-ordinating the tweeting of "Learn to code" at Ben Popken?

Perhaps I can put it another way

"I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality." - Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Feb 5 2019

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untog 2692 days ago
4chan. I mean, the threads are all public, it seems exceptionally stupid to claim it wasn't happening.
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pacerwpg 2693 days ago
It could also be that accounts that take part in harassment/harassment adjacent behavior may already have a few strikes against them for similar things.
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