Twitter's community verification system will be a disaster | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's community verification system will be a disaster

easydns.com

89 pointsStuntPope64 comments

The post goes into it but I just want to double assert that the blue check mark system is rather absurdly arbitrary. Not only is there a bias towards “Lefty” (quotes) views, but it’s often handed out to people who have no worry about impersonation because they are not a personality in of themselves.

Not only that, they (as a group) are not immune to spreading significant amounts of misinformation[0].

Who watches the watchers?

[0]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/twitter-verifie...

And since 2017 (maybe 2016) they've publicly stated the blue checks are 'on hold', though it seems some people still get them sometimes?

From the blue checks I see in my timeline right now it seems like it's completely arbitrary who has them vs. who doesn't.

For example: A few journalists with hundreds or thousands of followers do, while others with same amount (all of whom I think are decent journalists) don't. Many organizations do (whether they have thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, but some (with very recognizable names) don't. Some random individuals do, some don't, with follower counts in the hundreds to the millions.

The only thing it does for me is adds visual noise to the timeline. I can turn it off (in Tweetbot) and do, but I'm not sure what the point is currently.

Among people I know, the distribution of blue checks is so arbitrary that I'm convinced we're all participating in some modern form of Stanford Prison Experiment.

My sibling is a journalist in DC. New hires at her paper get check marks right away. Seems like there's still a point-man that these new organizations contact.

This is ripe for aa interesting article, but who wants to be the bad guy and end such a juicy perk?

> Not only is there a bias towards “Lefty” (quotes) views...

Is there a source for this? While it sounds credible, I don't think I've seen any data on it, and I've certainly seen a lot of "Righty" folks with blue checkmarks. (The ones the article you linked to talks about are entirely on the far right, in fact, although of course that article is in Mother Jones, which is...not on the far right.)

FD: I align with the left politically.

I don’t have (and can’t get) data direct from twitter. But it’s a common accusation.

https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/9354-twitter-accused...

https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-der...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/verified-politics/

Well, it's a common accusation from some louder parts of the Right, to be sure. But I've also heard folks on the left accuse Twitter of having a conservative or even alt-right bias because of the common occurrence of alt-right trolls gaming the reporting system to get leftist activists suspended. While that may be an exploitable flaw in Twitter's system, I doubt Jack Dorsey is a secret neo-Nazi; likewise, I take "Twitter is run by anti-conservative SJWs because they kicked off Milo and Richard Spencer" with more than a few grains of salt. :)

> I take "Twitter is run by anti-conservative SJWs because they kicked off Milo and Richard Spencer" with more than a few grains of salt. :)

They probably not, just regular progressives, although they could have friends in those circles. Btw taking too much salt isn't good for you.

Maybe not best example, but the last UK election on social media like Facebook and Twitter you would of thought Labour was going to landslide it going by what was promoted and trending. Yet the reality was different.

If anything - that highlighted how out of touch social media has become with reality of the populus.

This and so often seen people who are what I'd call hard-left label anything not sat inline with themselves as right-wing and when you are so far left, everything is right-wing, label and dismissed. Or Twitch-hunts as the article articulates it.

Likewise. I never realised there was so many people outside remaining totalitarian communist regimes who would openly support communism until I got on Twitter.

Getting a blue check is pretty much standard starting procedure for any new journalist at vice/buzzfeed/vox/etc. It's like part of the on-boarding process.

Even if you don't have much of a following, your colleagues email someone they know at Twitter and your verified check follows soon after.

Twitter's most important and most active users are journalists and they've made that abundantly clear.

Once again, do you have a source for this? Many right-wing journalists are also verified on Twitter.

Twitter themselves?

"An account may be verified if it is determined to be an account of public interest. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas. A verified badge does not imply an endorsement by Twitter."

NeimanLab just sent Twitter an excel spreadsheet to get all o f their employees in. https://twitter.com/ylichterman/status/484780960471592961

I don't doubt that -- but as Gizmo385 noted, conservative journalists get blue checkmarks, too. (Just as a sort of anecdotal check, I looked up the eight people on the masthead of The Bulwark, a pretty new conservative online publication, and everyone but the art director has a blue checkmark, as do three of the five non-masthead contributors.) So the question still stands.

(If you're implicitly suggesting that journalists tend as an overall class to skew left-of-center, there's a good case to be made for that -- but that's not a Twitter bias!)

Yeah, I'm not saying it's to the exclusion of right-leaning journalists. That said, Twitter has removed the blue check almost exclusively from public figures on the right.

IMO, even if someone's opinions are monstrous, if they have a verifiable twitter account in good standing, either they should also have a blue check or probably nobody should. Lest somebody impersonate _them_ and say things that are reasonable and confuse people.

Not sure it matters though. I think Twitter is a net-negative for society and if we had any sense about us we'd shut such things down.

It's a shame that Twitter (referring to the Twitter community, but especially the corporate entity) has conflated identify verification with a sort endorsement, including with policies like the one in this article that elevate what blue checks have to say. If they could have avoided that, the solution you propose would be fine, but human nature is to turn every distinction into a symbol of merit.

> Twitter has removed the blue check almost exclusively from public figures on the right

Do you have a source for that or is it your opinion?

Some of my friends and family are very quick to note that the overrepresentation of black and brown people in prison populations is not evidence of bias, because you have to look at who is committing the crimes.

But when it comes to right-wing personalities getting suspended or banned from private platforms, the same people are very slow to comprehend the same logic.

I'm not going to "citation needed" for stuff that was published as mainstream news. I wasn't espousing any particular party leaning (but if you need to know, I'm a progressive/lefty).

This question is in bad faith.

Nah, I've seen the "mainstream news" and it doesn't say Twitter is unverifying mainstream conservatives while not touching mainstream liberals.

Twitter banned those using the platform to organize Charlottesville violence and to engage in or promote harassment and violence.

Unless you conflate sanctioning harassment and violence with sanctioning "the right", then I'm asking you to substantiate your claim.

Having the blue check mark removed isn't a suspension or ban so you can't really go with "that group just happens to break the rules more". It's not like saying vile shit makes your account less verifiable. So when Twitter takes away verification it looks like they're just trying to signal affiliation with the opposing group.

> Having the blue check mark removed isn't a suspension or ban so you can't really go with "that group just happens to break the rules more"

That is utterly untrue.

Unverifying is a sanction for breaking the rules that's less severe than a suspension or ban.

According to Twitter's published guidelines, they'll un-verify accounts that:

Intentionally mislead people

Promote hate and/or violence

Incite or engage in harassment

Break the Twitter Rules

Source: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/twitter-ve...

On an aside...maybe it’s just me, but being a journalist on Twitter and sharing your personal opinions / philosophies / politics seems like a bad idea to me.

We trust journalists - the standard, non-opinion column ones - to be something of an impartial, truth-telling messenger on the state of the world.

When I go on a journalist’s Twitter page and see that she’s a staunch Marxist or hardcore Randian libertarian, I can’t help but wonder if that strong bias has seeped into her articles...both in what she’s writing to me, and in what she’s omitting.

Trusting journalists in 2020.

"We trust journalists" - you might be wise to not do that blindly. Journalist get paid from somebody.

> I can’t help but wonder if that strong bias has seeped into her articles...both in what she’s writing to me, and in what she’s omitting.

They would do that regardless, now at least you can find out their biases.

A lot of journalists cite pressure from their employers to be online and "engaged." I think it's probably a bad idea -- possibly in general, but particularly for journalists/columnists -- to say anything on Twitter that you wouldn't say in an an article or column. That doesn't necessarily preclude sharing opinions, philosophies, and politics, but it definitely entails a certain measure of restraint.

Maybe it's as simple as ex-TWTR ppl tending not to jump ship with their networks to Republican and conservative publications.

I see a TON of small town news reporters who are verified and have less than 500 followers. Perhaps there's some selection bias here, not that "lefty journalists" are more verified, it's just that their posts are more visible through engagement, etc.

Oh maybe a better example - fresh out of the pot:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51621812

Look at the sentiment analysis of Twitter the day after Trump was elected if you want to see how skewed it is.

Always keep in mind Twitter takes away check marks as a form of punishment. It’s bizarre to think of validating someone then invalidating them when they say something naughty, makes it seem like children are in charge.

Wow, this is a really terribly-written article. You'd imagine a company that had been around for 20 years would have a sense of professionalism or something. When someone is able to pinpoint your exact political alignment and the news outlets you read from a corporate blog post, you're probably doing something wrong.

Then again, the guy links to his book (with a subtitle of "Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks, Cancel-Culture and other Online Disasters" no less) at the end of the post, so this was probably intentional.

I share more or less the same political views as him, but this is ridiculous.

Ah, there's the comment I was expecting to find. Somebody assuming the author's political alignment based on the (awful) Tweets they chose to highlight. You claim to hold the same political views as him, so what are you trying to achieve? More internet points?

I found the article to be objective, included good sourced examples, and addressed a serious problem that has been discussed on HN many times before. The blue check mark system is terrible. It unconsciously makes readers trust the claims and assertions made by those that wield them. And as demonstrated in the article, blue-check-marked Tweeter often make horribly unverified claims, or incite outright violence. Both of these things I hope would be condemned by every side of the political spectrum, regardless or who is saying them.

He takes several obvious and blatant jokes seriously, and he does this because not long ago, two right- and right-libertarian outlets with relatively large audiences posted pieces intentionally misinterpreting them, practically admitting to doing so in the pieces. At best, the bad faith seems to be lost on him, of course.

The only thing worse than someone on an opposing side to you making a horrendous argument is someone on your own side making a grotesque one, and that's what he's doing here.

His "point" is completely invalidated by the examples he used, which (notably) are all jokes, bar one. It only takes someone with the most basic amount of social competency to tell that. It, later, is invalidated further by his claim that "rubes can figure out how to sift through b/s," which he demonstrates to be wrong with the contents of his post.

I don't think that twitter should be creating hierarchy on its site, and I'm far from against him politically: an abhorrent argument is still an abhorrent argument, though, and anti-intellectualism like this should be spoken out against wherever it appears, regardless of whose side it's on. This type of person making this type of argument devalues the side they're on as a whole, and should be strongly pushed out.

And that's not even getting into the idea that a corporate blog should stray away from overtly-political posts.

Not only does Twitter frequently verify users that are not noteworthy (online or off) or likely to be impersonated, the last I had seen they hadn't even addressed the absurdly common fake Elon Musks shilling crypto scams. Even if this has been fixed since the last time I saw it, it's much more likely that they just trigger manual review of any account that uses a name/avatar similar to Musk instead of actually fixing the real problems.

The bad behavior of the blue ticks is widely recognized independent of ideological bend, and I predict that many of the accounts of actual value will wear these scarlet letters as badges of honor if this system actually gets implemented.

Someone should train a GPT-2 twitter bot on the fake Elon Musk crypto scams to automate the creation of fake Elon Musk crypto scams.

On a related note, I get my daily dose of valley thought leadership from https://twitter.com/real_human_vc - it truly captures the zeitgeist of what VCs talk about.

For a little while putting Elon Musk in your display name got your account automatically suspended, I think when the crypto scam thing was at its worst. I haven't seen anyone talk about that scam lately so they may have moved on to better ones (like the relatively new scam where if someone asks you for a paypal donate URL, a bot impersonates you and posts one in the replies almost instantly)

Why would anybody expect blue ticks to behave "good" in the first place? Even being a high ranking professional with plenty to lose is no guarantee that they won't, nor is there any guarantee that lower levels will be better.

The only thing to hint is if there is some sort of enforcement mechanism but that is a foregone "who watches the watchers" situation.

I particularly enjoy Arthur the Aardvark's take on false information on the internet[1].

The author is right. Letting the community decide what is true will be a disaster. Really, truth (or lack there of) is outside Twitter's scope. Twitter exists to allow users to communicate. Not to educate users on critical thinking, or arbitrate truth. Even if they "democratize" truth.

1 - https://youtu.be/YWdD206eSv0

The very fact that people continue to use Twitter demonstrates that we collectively are not good at filtering anything. The author writes as if they themselves are somehow immune from something they clearly aren't.

I do think putting this power into the hands of blue checks is a mistake. But then, I think using Twitter is a mistake.

I don't see how that follows neccessarily, many aren't there for the filtering or truth but access to the content. It is theoretically possible to filter or avoid the BS.

I think they are trapped in a fool's errand no matter what personally given the precedents set up and the problem being humanity which stubbornly refuses to accept it or that there are no good solutions.

Twitter can be a useful tool. I follow about a 50 or so people who tweet on stuff I am interested in, and I have blocked 1000+ people.

> Ryan Broderick, a self-professed hebephile

It's pretty clear that the tweet in question was satirizing people who use terms like "hebephiles" to defend themselves. While you can argue in good faith whether the satire worked, was a good idea, was appropriate, etc., taking the tweet at face value and saying that he's a "self-professed hebephile" is not arguing in good faith.

So either the author doesn't understand what was going on or is choosing to lie about it for rhetorical purposes - either way the author isn't a credible voice.

Actually, no, that is not clear at all. What is clear is that Ryan Broderick demonstrated ideation of a sexual nature with underage children on multiple posts.

There were numerous other items from his tumblr and instagram which make it clear broderick was not being satirical.

See the screengrabs captured here

https://www.cernovich.com/ryan-broderick-racist-tweets-vile-...

OR here

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buzzfeed-journo-reported...

But it looks like you're willing to give a lefty a pass on behaviour that would be career ending from a conservative, which is par for the course.

1. None of that makes it clear he was not being satirical to me. Can you explain? Again, it all seems like extremely questionable humor, and you can question the humor in good faith (and you can also argue that ironic humor still has harmful effects, etc.), and you can certainly say in good faith, "Someone who makes these kinds of jokes should not have a moderation role at Twitter." But saying that it was not humor - that Broderick was genuinely claiming to be a hebephile - is a large logical leap that seems unjustified to me. Can you justify it?

(As it happens, I did read Cernovich's page to confirm that I had the correct understand of the tweet before I commented. I am more confident in my comment having read it.)

2. I'm not sure this would be career-ending for a conservative, why would it be?

3. Par for what course?

How is taking a person who describes himself as "us hebephiles" a huge leap? Either people say what they mean or they don't.

If they don't, then you also have to give a pass to every conservative off-hand remark that got their career derailed.

> How is taking a person who describes himself as "us hebephiles" a huge leap? Either people say what they mean or they don't.

Genuine question. Are you familiar with the concept of jokes?

Again, I am not saying it is a good joke, or a funny joke, or an appropriate joke, or a joke that should merit employment from BuzzFeed, or any such thing. I am simply saying it was intended as a joke. Do you genuinely believe that the point of that post was to earnestly petition the president?

> If they don't, then you also have to give a pass to every conservative off-hand remark that got their career derailed.

Sure, okay, pass given.

How about this one,

https://web.archive.org/web/20181223004937/https://ryanhates...

I'm sure he's just riffing, right?

OK, so, you're not familiar with the concept of a joke, in fact.

Again - if you wanted to argue that Broderick's posts were in bad taste, sure, that's a defensible argument (and I might even agree with you). But that's not what you said. You said he's a self-proclaimed hebephile.

Of course, I don't expect everyone to be familiar with 4chan-style humor. Oprah once earnestly warned her viewers about a message she received about "over 9000 penises": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7liYfhRgXGk Last month, Congressional candidate Regina Marston started reporting the Navy SEAL copypasta to the FBI: https://twitter.com/samosu_/status/1224169132410753024 But if you're running a popular DNS host and writing books about how to protect yourself from cancel culture... yes, I expect you in particular to understand what's going on here, and I stand by my claim that you're not a credible voice.

It is very clear the argument isn’t being made in good faith. It’s really not worth pursuing further - I assume the aim of these accusations are basically just hoping no one actually looks at the evidence. How could anyone view a twitter post making a personal request to the president as anything other than satirical?

They couldn’t. They don’t. Its not worth talking about beyond that.

Pretty sure he's making fun of Justin Bieber but that was lost on you

He seems to have a long history of cringey rape and hebephile “jokes”. It’s not all obviously satire to me.

He's very clearly mocking right-libertarians, who are very prone to having outbursts of "Actually, it's just hebephilia."

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughLibertarianSpam/comments/7obs...

It's a meme intensely common on imageboards, and reddit as well. Here's an /r/copypasta thread mocking these people:

https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/53fkty/

> Us rubes can figure out how to sift through b/s and make our own determinations on what passes the smell test.

Yeah, no. If "smell tests" worked, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Yeah, who doesn't think this will devolve into voting rings and positive re-enforcement loops?

I don't see how this will turn out well.

I think they are better off with self-regulated groups ala Flickr and Reddit with some appeals system (like Flickr). Otherwise it will be abused because it's set up that way.

The blue check mark should mean nothing other than "this account belongs to who it says it does". And that's it.

Unfortunately, Twitter has reinforced the incorrect unconscious bias of treating the blue tick as meaning "credibility/reliability", by removing it from people who state opinions and hold views that Twitter (the company) doesn't like. This has led to a severe imbalance on the political spectrum of who holds blue ticks, and increases the ability for the celebrities and journalists to control the narrative online.

This should only be seen as a bad thing for everybody, regardless of your political alignment.

Twitter verified is inherently a flawed system. I personally know people who got it simply because they knew people who worked at Twitter.

Let's not kid ourselves that most high-tech companies based out the bay area are going to have very heavily biased political beliefs and opinions. Remember the Twitter employee (now-ex) that deleted Trump's twitter account?

I don't think not being biased is possible except /maybe/ an absolute null set.

Any position on a mapping qualifies as a bias technically, it just may not map to something considered such or sensible. What is meant most of the time is if it is contentious or controversial which is utterly orthogonal to morals and reality. If enough people dogmatically insist that using punctuation is intellectual elitism or acknowledging gravity is then it may become a "political issue". They would be objectively wrong in every stance but by definition would be right about it being political. A cat walking across a keyboard is biased compared to anyone actually writing even including the worst typists chemically impaired.

>In other words, and this applies to all tech platforms, don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about anybody. Us rubes can figure out how to sift through b/s and make our own determinations on what passes the smell test.

Does this guy have memory loss or something. There is a reason why twitter is looking at these changes and just saying "Oh yeah go back to how it used to be" is not a sensible response to this.

I am quite excited to see facebook and Twitter's opposing takes on this problem play out over the next few years.

From Twitter's perspective, it won't be a disaster, it will work exactly as they plan.

If easydns can't survive a HN flood then I wouldn't want to be a customer of theirs.

I've never had a problem with their DNS service (only service I use). I don't always agree with Mark.

> If somebody else has an issue with somebody’s tweets, I don’t know, maybe there could be some sort of “reply” function or something where somebody could rebut the contents of a tweet.

The problem is the asymmetric nature of the costs of producing bullshit vs the costs of providing carefully reasoned rebuttals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com