[DoreenMichele]

I am sorry for the responses I am seeing on HN. People with cushy lives who've likely never faced similar danger seem to just not really get it.

I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will have trouble taking seriously.

It might go over better to document known cases where this pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through it like they are five, so to speak.

I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my experience that approach works better.

I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.

I hope something improves soon.

[tsol]

It's strange though, when it involves lgbtq or politics they suddenly understand why Twitter may need to police certain kinds of conversations. But when the actors involved are foreign, suddenly those high minded ideals turn into ambiguity and 'Twitter understandably doesn't want to take a side'. Yet last month I was hearing on this very forum that inaction is indeed pushing a side

[SpicyLemonZest]

I've never seen even the most censorious Americans argue that Twitter should investigate every accusation that person A is paid by group B. That scenario has actually been playing out over the past few days on American politics twitter, with a couple high profile journalists being falsely accused of taking out PPP loans, but Twitter didn't moderate those accusations and as far as I can tell nobody thinks they should have.

I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as some kind of hypocrisy.

[notahacker]

I tend to see the reverse. People fume over social networks allowing people in, say, Myanmar to write about alleged events they have no way of verifying with political implications they don't understand in a language they don't understand because people are dying [mostly at the hands of a military that really doesn't care what social media thinks]. Then they get very unhappy if the same social network decides to block obviously mendacious nonsense posted by fellow Americans

Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...

[root_axis]

It's not strange. Twitter is a U.S. company, of course it takes a deeper interest in matters of U.S. politics than it does about every other country on the planet.

[oarabbus_]

They said nothing about Twitter's behavior being strange. They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.

[sangnoir]

> They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.

There's nothing strange about that either - Twitter only acts to moderate when it has context and/or gets bad press. It's no surprise that American hot-button issues are the most moderated[1] by Twitter, and less sor for heinous, explicit threats to life in a language spoken by < 1 million speakers halfway around the world, or election misinformation in Kenya. That sort of thing never gets on Twitter's radar, and shouldn't come as a surprise.

1. This is a result of resource constraints, and Twitter's own sense of self-preservation. There is only one jurisdiction that can dissolve Twitter, and is also likely its largest revenue source; naturally, that gets an outsized fraction of Twitter's limited engineer-hours and moderator-hours.

[oarabbus_]

No, read their post again. They're referring to people's perception of Twitter enforcement being strange, not twitter's enforcement.

[watwut]

The threats against lgbtq and especially trans run WILD on twitter. There are whole accounts dedicated to harassing them and outing them to huge amounts of followers. It takes super log for twitter to even delete a tweet.

[deltree7]

People with cushy lives, working for some mid-level corp writing CRUD apps used by 20 people, also have never faced the challenges of moderation at million people scale. So, it kind of cuts both ways

[pessimizer]

Yet somehow they still have the bandwidth to go after people for misgendering or for saying that they're happy that someone died.

[remram]

I would understand if the rhetoric was centered around "it's very hard for Twitter to do that" but the detraction in the comments reads more "Twitter shouldn't do that".

[dcow]

For me it’s more of a: “this is what happens when you are ideologically inconsistent”. I don't feel like people are saying “Twitter shouldn’t”. I think the correct interpretation is “Twitter can’t”.

I thoroughly despise Twitter because they bless some issues and not others. Even though I support the end game of what they are trying to do (e.g. in the case of LGBTQ agenda topics), I vehemently disagree with the idea that the means to the end should involve policed speech and controlled narratives. Because that’s what fascists do.

So my problem is actually with Twitter. I pity the author. But I blame Twitter for creating the perception that they support the western rights of all individuals across the globe. Because they don’t, and can’t.

[remram]

I see what you mean. Twitter shouldn't have put themselves in a situation where this is expected of them, because it was never possible. I wholeheartedly agree, I've had my account locked for innocuous tweets that triggered some keywords before.

[hackerlight]

> also have never faced the challenges of moderation at million people scale. So, it kind of cuts both ways

Not really, given that I can see the billions in cash on hand of these social media companies, which they could use to hire real people instead of intentionally neglecting customer service because it isn't a driver of profits, and instead choosing to dump these costs on the taxpayer of the countries that have to clean up the mess via the legal system. Negligence or even incompetence is not a valid excuse for actively facilitating a spectrum of behaviors ranging from harassment (this case) to fomenting populism (US elections) to outright murder (Myanmar).

[deltree7]

Again, you have no clue how to handle this.

It's not about the money. Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people.

Then you are going to say, codify it and don't allow variations, which means a program / AI can do a better job, which is what most of these firms are optimizing far.

Unless you have personally solved that issue or have an example of someone solving it, it is literally arm-chair critiquing

[hackerlight]

It's cute that you assume good faith. Here is evidence they are operating in bad faith. They allow users who are being harassed to disable replies but not quote tweets. These quote tweets are then used as a vector of further harassment and dogpiling. This happened with Steven Pinker for a time period and Amber Heard. They are choosing virality over preventing harassment.

  "Assume you can hire 100,000 people. How would you maintain consistency among all those 100,000 people. You'll get huge variance in the kind of decision making from each of those people."

This is the perfect solution fallacy. Perfect solutions are not the bar. Timely response to reports and human review is the bar that I expect of them. And they're failing to meet that bar.

[waqasx]

thank you so much! your support means a lot.