Birdwatch Overview
twitter.github.io
twitter.github.io
I spend a few months in a corner of Twitter with lots of open-minded and free discussion of politics between non-celebrity nobodies. Many accounts in said corner were brigaded, and then shadowbanned or banned outright, etc.
I'm still sore about the platform's intolerance, but it was a powerful lesson about the intolerance in modern society. Birdwatch seems to be yet another mechanism which enables and furthers the shutdown of free expression.
I'm very happy that HN is still capable of having thoughts that stray outside the Overton window, and that zealots are usually ignored =)
Since HN mainly has startup-minded people on here, I think this actually opens up opportunities for new startups to enter the social media space. There is definitely a large audience who is looking for a more "professional" version of twitter so to speak. Start by blocking anonymous accounts/aliases since this is what every troll hides behind.
When group size is large, conversation is shallow.
HN is a relatively small group with a relatively confined subject matter.
Same concept applies on reddit, with small niche subreddits.
There's more conversation depth with smaller groups of people.
https://articlesofunity.org/2020/09/press-release-for-our-tw...
Are we supposed to believe that Twitter hates bipartisanship or unity or something? It doesn’t pass the laugh test. Biden’s entire inauguration content package leaned into those themes and we can all note that their accounts are still online.
All the signs point to @articlesofunity account being banned for technical violations of Twitter’s terms of service, specifically the use of automation to falsely pump up its follower count. Thats why the banned account had 25.5k followers but the history account, which purports to carry its flame, has about 100 followers.
Weinstein says that Twitter never gave them a reason for the ban, and even after getting a line to Dorsey, the most Twitter would do is allow people to link to Articles of Unity on the app. It’s still banned. And when you link it PM, it still gives you a “suspicious content” warning[1]. That doesn’t just seem like a follower inflation punishment to me. It’s also not the precedent.
That defeats your theory on my eyes. As for a reasonable reason that AoU was banned, the most likely one to me is that someone at Twitter didn’t like that AoU was getting hashtags to trend that put people against both Trump and Biden during a critical moment in the race. Their movement would likely hurt Biden the most as it would splinter the “anyone but Trump” voter. Btw asking if Twitter banned AoU because Twitter hates unity is a very weak attempt at brainstorming the truth, is that really where your analysis ended?
Twitter has super selective inexplicable inconsistent bans all the time. Like “men aren’t women” getting you suspended while “kill all men” does not. Twitter has obvious heavy handed biases, so don’t overthink it.
[1] https://twitter.com/bootylactin/status/1351278941751926788
I honestly couldn't tell you what got them banned; but I'm sure having politically charged tweets probably didn't help either group. It would seem anything political right now is on the radar of Twitter. Aside from that subject matter, I'm not sure what warrants a suspension these days.
Then over a year later I was permanently suspended for saying that a bunch of rich scientists that someone was talking about were "a bunch of insufferable cunts".
If only I'd said those things about Trump, I'd still be on there....
> I'm still sore about the platform's intolerance, but it was a powerful lesson about the intolerance in modern society. Birdwatch seems to be yet another mechanism which enables and furthers the shutdown of free expression.
I posted a proposal (basically, government mandated, non-partisan, constant auditing of software and processes of all major public communication platforms) in another thread on this story - do you think this might be a plausible approach to addressing this censorship issue, at least in part?
A better use of this data would be to highlight the counter-consensus speakers so that I can have a listen.
On Twitter what objective measure are you going to use to evaluate “The election was stolen by widespread voter fraud”? The news? Half of the country believes that “liberal” news is full of lies and the other half thinks the same of “conservative” news.
I mean, you clearly meant to write Eurasia, but that's a really unfortunate typo.
There is no reason to believe the WHO was in possession of secret evidence of human-to-human transmission on that date, and they noted that it was entirely possible said evidence would emerge soon. It did shortly afterwards.
To put it in boring mathematical terms. If you have a bag filled with a million playing cards, and you inspect 1000 of them and they're all red, that's pretty good evidence that there aren't any black cards in the bag! But blind followers of the "absence of evidence" dogma would say "No it isn't! Just because you haven't found a black card yet doesn't say anything about whether there are any black cards at all." which is clearly nonsense.
The differentiating factor is have you looked?
I think it's reasonable for people to assume the WHO had actually investigated how people contracted covid (otherwise why bother tweeting?), in which case them saying "[we looked but] we couldn't find any evidence of human to human transmission" is clearly misleading.
> I think it's reasonable for people to assume the WHO had actually investigated how people contracted covid...
The tweet explicitly says "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities". The WHO team didn't get there until Jan 20. https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...
> otherwise why bother tweeting?
Because everyone was wondering at the time if they had the evidence yet.
> "[we looked but] we couldn't find any evidence of human to human transmission" is clearly misleading
That's not what they said, though.
Right it doesn't matter who looks, just that someone does. The Chinese looked! And they didn't find any evidence of human-to-human transmission. That is evidence that there isn't any. Not very compelling evidence but still evidence.
Again, this is a bit you're adding out of nowhere. The WHO did not make that claim in the tweet, and is quoted on the same day as that tweet saying evidence of human-to-transmission is likely to emerge.
People alleging human-to-human transmission of a pathogen should similarly present evidence of it. Within a week of that tweet, the WHO had said evidence in hand. (https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...)
Agreed, which is exactly why the topic should not be verboten.
Trump's suspension was for inciting violence.
One of the first Twitter accounts that was getting the straight facts out of Wuhan starting with late January was this lady [1], and because she had written for Epoch Times (among other things) of course meant that everything she was saying was potentially a big, fat lie meant to denigrate the Chinese. I was told as such by at least one user on this very website back then.
I too have concerns about how this will play out, but we should be open minded about different solutions to an important challenge.
A concern I haven't seen mentioned yet is that disputes might end up being won through attrition, which is one of the pitfalls of Wikipedia. I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but I just couldn't keep up with folks who had seemingly infinite time to debate or nitpick.
Eventually some moderators will get tired and decide to do something less emotionally taxing with their time; what will that self-selection mean for the kinds of people who will stay?
Yes, Twitter wants you fact check for free. They also want you to write Tweets for free. In return, the hypothetical value proposition is that the tweets you and others read are more likely to be factual. If this is successful at scale, it means that the voters in the hopefully democratic place you live will be more informed and more likely to vote for reality based policies.
So, sure, they don't give you a nickel when you fact check. But that doesn't mean it doesn't (possibly) provide sufficient value to you to be worth doing.
https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/faq/
The first phase of this pilot will be limited to a small test group in the US
The pilot will start small and grow over time. Our goal is to admit applicants on a rolling, periodic basis. We will admit all participants who meet the required criteria, but if we have more applicants than pilot slots, we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing accounts that are likely to participate due to having been recently active on Twitter, and those that tend to follow and engage with different tweets than existing participants do — so as to reduce the likelihood that participants would be predominantly from one ideology, background, or interest space.
Aah, the devil in the details.
we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing accounts
And there's the catch.
If they open it up to foreign countries, then Congress will complain about foreign influence in American politics.
Catch 22?
I agree that the way big American tech companies mostly care about the US and suffer from ethnocentrism when stepping outside the US is a problem but I’m not sure what a solution would even look like.
If it is a fact, then it could marked as true or false, with further proof.
If it is opinion, then there could be a different grading.