Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial
patriotone.substack.com
patriotone.substack.com
They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information".
By that logic, Twitter should also be blocking @jack's account due to all the Bitcoin-pushing going on there too.
In fact, I think I'll go report it now...
Seems like they are doing network-based targeting, because none of them had tweeted anything particularly offensive.
Of course BitwiseFool and I have no proof beyond our observations so please don't ask for proof of Twitters internal workings. Note we have no proof of why this Maxwell trial account was suspended other than twitters word. They provided us with no data or proof. This is very common now. Folks take the word of tech companies as hard fact and any other speculation is not allowed.
Any twitter employee want to use a throwaway account to set the record straight? Doubt it.
> Big tech has gotten too powerful, and they can silence us anytime they want.
Substack is well on its way to becoming part of "big tech" and is yet another platform you don't control.
Setting up your own blog will not protect you from any and all threats but it makes arbitrary "suspensions" very difficult.
While it's certainly a possible concern, not all platforms descend in to censorship. I think it's reasonable to wait until there's at least warning signs before criticizing a specific site.
> We reserve the right to remove any content from Substack at any time, for any reason (including, but not limited to, if someone alleges you contributed that content in violation of these Terms), in our sole discretion, and without notice.
https://twitter.com/jkbjournalist
Adam Klasfeld is another one I enjoy:
yes, but this one was the most popular. If they're looking at suppressing news or attention, they'd want to ban the most popular, not the most credible necessarily.
500k sounds extremely unlikely to be the largest reporter covering this, and even if it is, it's not that much more than the reputable reports who have 200k+
Here are some direct links to the accounts the parent mentioned, for example: https://nitter.42l.fr/jkbjournalist and https://nitter.42l.fr/KlasfeldReports
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/14686045141691965...
We don't know why the account was actually banned aside from Twitter's evidence-free assertions.
There's no evidence this account violated the Twitter TOS.
From HN community guidelines on reading into a comment:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
This is part of the reason why I detest Twitter's leadership. It's the tyranny of selectively enforcing the rules and hiding behind it. If someone tells me the same dozen or so twitter handles that always manage to chime in at the top of just about every trending social topic are authentic, I simply won't believe them. Why aren't these banned?
Well I can't disagree with that. It is endemic of Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc.
When these companies deal with the sheer volume of users they have they hide behind rules that are judged via algorithm and are not able to be evaluated or appealed unless you get enough attention on social media.
It is yet another argument for the elimination of them. If they can't manage themselves then they shouldn't be running.
> It was some doofus not at the trials trying to shill his paid sub stack and then tweeting absolute bullshit. As you can imagine, a lot of the 500,000 followers were bots, which is probably why it got suspended. Also we are covering this for Barstool Sports.
(Quote tweeting a Barstool Sports account, so that part’s a joke).
> It had 200k followers the day after it was launched it doesn’t take a damn genius to figure it out!!!
That seems pretty poor to me for such a high profile case.
Proof: https://imgur.com/a/78aNg1b
But an analogy is, if you have a legitimate criticism of the security state/"deep state" (a phrase I use and have no aversion to), it's not useful to buy into Qanon nonsense just because they criticize some of the same people. I know nothing directly about "patriot one" so I'm not saying it's Qanon level nonsense, but I'll defer to TrueAnon that it was probably counter-productive as a source. And making that judgment doesn't put anyone in league with the devil.
Just follow better informed and more scrupulous sources. TrueAnon are flippant and mischievous in ways that diminish them slightly, but on the whole, they're excellent. And they're at the trial every day.
I don't know how you operate, but when I hear that the royal family is implicated, I immediately start to wonder who else is involved and not dismiss the case all together.
* Very powerful people procured his services for something illegal <- Maybe, no proof
* Epstein had incriminating evidence on those powerful people proving their illegal activities <- Maybe, no proof, requires above unproven point to be true
* Powerful people knew what evidence he had, believed he would leverage it to reduce his punishment <- Maybe, no proof, requires all above unproven points to be true
* Powerful people hired ninjas to invade the detention center, evade all the cameras (all but one camera was working and recorded the approaches to his cell), murder Epstein to make it look exactly like a suicide, leave no traces, no witnesses <- Maybe, getting pretty ludicrous by now
Isn’t that a reason to follow the case?
And in the UK, the media is constrained by stronger libel laws such that they'll sit on their haunches in terms of reporting on things in the case until they are considered factual enough to withstand a UK libel suit. Allegations thrown about in a foreign court of law don't meet that bar.
Something else I noticed that I think has changed is the follower counts on suspended accounts, which is only available on the app. It may have always been hidden on the web.
I get it, they're a private platform. But if they're acting on behalf of powerful state actors, how can we say that's not suppression on speech? The white house has admitted that they're in direct contact with social media platforms even going so far as tagging posts for "misinformation" [1]. In theory the state can't restrict the speech on social media. But in practice they don't even need to.
[0] https://twitter.com/NancyTracker
[1] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
https://gab.com/NancyTracker/posts/107411717342791428
If so - whatever got them suspended (bot farm upvotes usually?) got both accounts suspended. These then aren't separate suspensions but one person's suspension across multiple accounts.
But other times, those automated malicious activity detectors are doing their job correctly, and people really ARE doing something underhanded, and the giant corporation in question chooses not to air their reasoning in public, which is probably the right call (from the corporation's perspective) most of the time. It's hard to know from the outside which one of those two things happened.
Bunch of examples: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1465833079952625664
I’m glad it’s gone, that pivot was hard and weird since the Pelosis stopped daytrading
Well you would first have to prove that they were acting on the behalf of powerful state actors. Does anyone have that proof?
They could move the tracker to a suitable Mastodon instance [3] or even host their own Mastodon instance in order to get a suitable exposure out there (Maybe even use one of the Blogging instances). This would also be a first test how robust the Fediverse is with respect to external pressure.
[1] https://fediverse.party/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [3] https://instances.social/
According to the account owner's substack, they are on Gab. So, sort of.
I don't think so. Gab doesn't federate with the rest of the network, so for all intents and purposes it's not part of the Fediverse.
A person can say what they want but no-one is forced to listen to it or help promote it.
As well, if this account was part of a system of bots and fake accounts that were spreading a particular message isn't that something that you want to see removed from a social media platform?
Isn't authentic information and material important?
And hundreds of thousands of people thought it was useful.
After that, I try to avoid Twitter when possible.
It's also a cesspool of entitled pseudo-intellectuals (both left and right leaning), so I don't miss it much, honestly.
Even if you aren't concerned about issues that this account brings up it is a miserable user experience.
Since then I've discovered many cool resources and been invited to niche dev communities. It's too early to say if it's worth it yet but I would say yes if I can grow to a few hundred followers. (At that point you have supported to boost product hunt launches, people to give feedback, amplify your support issues, etc)
For me twitter is the only source where i can subscribe to people who aren't passionate, aren't constantly preaching, and aren't afraid to present their side of the story (they exist, you just have to find them by aggressive elimination)
The system can easily be gamed and there is something about the immediacy of it that tends to inflame people. Which I suspect is why there are so many people trying to game them in the first place.
As a whole I don't think we are really mentally and emotionally prepared for this kind of communication.
On one hand, there are a lot of bots which are more or less malicious, e.g. trying to cause political strife or promote scams. On the other hand, Twitter sells advertisers on the idea that they have however many millions of users. So if Twitter was to actually get rid of the bots, then they would cause advertising revenue to drop, which might actually kill the company. So they are stuck with algorithmic techniques which walk a fine line of accuracy.
The solution is probably to mass verify real users (though "real name" verification is problematic). Right now, they use verification as a way to play favorites. Real users with hundreds of thousands of followers can't get verified.
At the moment people are just reacting to the headline and there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the debate due to this.
It's clear Twitter suspended the account for TOS violations, and not the subject matter.
I have no dog in this fight, do not follow the case, but a quick search of Twitter yielded these not-suspended accounts that are "reporting court proceedings" as you say:
https://twitter.com/USvMaxwell https://twitter.com/Trial_Tracker https://twitter.com/CultStateDotCom https://twitter.com/MaxwellTrial
There are dozens at first glance.
There is even a trial tracker tracker...
https://twitter.com/CensorTracker
So, @hxkandbe's request that we use the suspended account's blog post about the suspension to add some context and clarity is in no way suppressing the discussion, but instead seeking to elevate and inform it.
Not casting judgment on this specific case, but the ease with which it's possible to selectively apply TOS to bans should be concerning to free speech oriented people.
Just make a broad TOS and you can ban anybody you like.
*in recent international history.
This goes far beyond the US. The UK's Royal Family and other very high profile people all over the planet are implicated, in addition to US citizens.
@NancyTracker, the account that tweets Pelosi's stock trades, was suspended today.
Not to be conspiratorial, but through a political lens they both serve to serve a similar message. Maybe they're part of a low-profile campaign, who knows.
Every day there is more and more of this that I am losing hope.
Whatever the reasoning behind not going into more detail may be is irrelevant. The fact that none is given feeds directly into the narrative that Big Tech is unjustly censoring The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know and only exacerbates the current environment of distrust and disinformation. I feel like this is something that is going to have to change to have any hope of ever returning to some sort of consensus on what constitutes objective reality.
The redefinition would be to say, "once you own more than X% of something, it cannot be governed by existing rules about 'private' spaces?"
Or there NEEDS to be a jurisdiction where if you are big enough, you can't just arbitrarily ban users from your space. The propagation of free thought and sound ideas depends on one of the points completely. There are huge problems, like how a company can be regulated when it is a global company. I don't want US law to facilitate Swedish spaces.
Honestly, the first idea where habits are formed back onto the "old commons" is probably the only real solution. But it's not exactly simple to change the habits of an entire planet.
Did you speak out when Trump got banned? If not, did you really think they would only go after the „bad guys“?
Isn't that the whole point of Twitter?
Lawsuits challenging a censorship action or account suspension relating to censorship should be granted an exception to the otherwise binding arbitration agreement.
The purpose of this would be to deter ad hoc political censorship, and to instead encourage these companies to move towards a more procedure driven censorship system in which they simply respond to court orders and leave everything else up. So, for example, if I sued the John Doe operating this account for copyright infringement or if a law enforcement agency won a court order to get the account taken down for posting illegal pornography, that's fine, that's how things are supposed to work.
If instead the service is just arbitrarily censoring people, they have to keep strict records of their work products and produce those records in discovery. The companies would also have a hard time deflecting responsibility onto individual censors because almost anything that they could possibly do would be within the scope of their employment.
Yes, this would make what most of these companies do with their censorship teams economically impractical. That's the point.
Only a nonprofit out-of-reach of any particular governments' jurisdiction can remain neutral, but they also need minimal, clear, healthy, and conscientious moderation to not be springboards for harmful activities.
It is hard to classify censorship as speech for a site that it is all about user-content.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/900/commercial-...
I understand that some people don't like this situation but that is the reality of US federal law today. It won't change without a Constitutional amendment, or a major realignment of the Supreme Court.
The food safety labels is an interesting point, but I'm not even talking about gov regulations here. Just, let's say Twitter deletes your post. What do you sue them for?
The 1a allows twitters employees to express themselves as they wish, even through the company, so their removal of your post is simply their own protected expression.
Any amendment written before slavery was abolished probably had a rather flexible view on the whole "people" issue. If an African American can be property then a corporation can be a person.
I made one comment on this and that makes me obsessed?
> This discussion has nothing to do with race.
The claim was that it applied to people, I merely mentioned that what the law considers people is a rather flexible thing.
Their _entire_ business model is predicated on their algorithm manipulating engagement. There's very little "organic" engagement on social media any more.
It's Twitter's audience, not yours. That's why I left: I got tired of sharecropping.
You can't spam, but they can inject ads inline.
In which case I absolutely do not want accounts to be artificially increasing engagement.
Even more so when they're owned by specific interest groups.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-mani...
Good way to get an account suspended, I suppose.
1) Every account on Twitter has "bot activity associated with this account": if for no other reason that random advertising bots retweet, follow, or like random people and posts to attempt to blend in as a genuine account and hide their true purpose. This reasoning gives Twitter essentially carte blanche to delete everybody, even assuming they were willing to be fully transparent about the evidence surrounding their bans (which they're not).
2) Bad Actors can easily sabotage accounts they dislike. Here's just 1 method how this can be done: there's 10,001 shady fly by night firms in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and other countries that offer services to "buy followers" or "buy retweets". It's trivial for somebody without programming skill and even a few hundred dollars to just buy mass spam and shill the hell out of an account (the lower quality the better) until somebody notices and that account gets banned.
You don't even have to assign bad motives to Twitter to see the obvious problems here.
Actually serious.
But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it?
I'm not trying to pick on anybody here, but I believe there's a level of arrogance in thinking that this form of sabotage is somehow a solvable problem unless you somehow have access to all communications on the planet.
In this case, a fairly straightforward account age rule would get you like 95% of the way there. My twitter account, which is 7 years old and has a few hundred followers and tweets once a week isn't going to benefit from this. You don't ban it. Similarly, you don't ban a 7 year old account with 10s of thousands of followers that's been doing the same kind of tweeting for 2 years and recently got a bunch of bot follows.
On the other hand, a 3 week old account with a ton of bot follows is suspicious. This'll miss older accounts that were unused and changed (e.g. if my account suddenly started tweeting 17x a day about divisive political content and suddenly got a bunch of bot follows, so you need slightly fancier approaches).
You probably further improve this with some kind of multifaceted account realness score based on a pagerank like analysis of followers (following bots lowers your score, as does being followed by them). And ofc you still ban the bots, but you don't punish any accounts above a certain threshold of "real".
The other part of it is that randomly sabotaging twitter accounts isn't going to happen very often, it costs money, and unless there's an ROI (extorting people), no one is going to do it except a handful of people for teh lulz or whatever. But importantly, most of those people will be bad at doing this kind of attack in a convincing way.
There are lots of difficult problems, but OP chose one that doesn't happen and is straightforward to address.
Yes, this is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing though (and goes to the "change in behavior" thing I mentioned, which while more challenging, is still often detectable).
> Brigading attacks by flagging content in bad faith are also very common for political and ideological reasons.
Yes, but this is distinct from trying to frame someone for purchasing/using bot follows, and so is mostly irrelevant to what we were discussing. I agree that this is a challenging problem to solve, it's just not the one that was mentioned.
I'll reiterate:
There are challenging problems in abuse detection. Someone abusively using fake accounts to frame a legitimate user else for using fake accounts isn't a particularly challenging (or relevant) one.
b) For your page rank analysis, how do you a priori decide who is a bot or not? Oh I know, you can look at a bunch of data like posting frequency, location, keywords, links posted, and other things, and try and create some clever formula to decide the likelihood that some account is a bot. But at the end of the day, even the best possible approach is going to miss bots created by even half-way clever people, and wrongly screw some innocent people over.
c) What about transparency? How can the public trust any of Twitter's claims that bots did X, therefore we had to ban account Y? Where's the proof? Given that bots on Twitter are endemic, this accusation would always be technically true, to some extent.
d) The amount of money and effort thrown around to influence social media is staggering. Even if you can't program, even an average person can buy tens of thousands of followers for what amounts to pocket change. The crazy Twitter activists who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter wouldn't be willing to spend what amounts to a few days worth of minimum wage work to try and take out some arch-nemesis? A shady political activist who wants to influence politics or hide some damaging info and has access to millions of funding isn't able to arrange this? A nation state who wants to put their thumb on the scale of American public opinion can't spend the tiniest bit of pocket change for a concerted effort to move the scale of public opinion?
e) I don't want to be insulting, but your stated approach and mentality here is exactly why Big Tech algorithms screw over so many innocent people.
That is newspeak pure and simple.
The only things they’re not happy about is news they don’t agree with is getting engagement.
I.e. “you’re holding it wrong.”[1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/amp
Where does it say the information was false in that sentence? The newspeak worked.
and to go from "artificially" to bots and fake accounts... OK, maybe. But how do you know? Not because they told you in that sentence, that's for sure.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-mani...
There is nothing ambiguous or euphemistic about the phrase. It is very meaningful.
Definition of artificial
1 : humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model : man-made
// an artificial limb
// artificial diamonds
2a : having existence in legal, economic, or political theory
b : caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency
// an artificial price advantage
// Within these companies, qualified women run into artificial barriers that prevent them from advancing to top positions in management.— James J. Kilpatrick
3a : lacking in natural or spontaneous quality
// an artificial smile
// an artificial excitement
b : imitation, sham
// artificial flavor
4 : based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships
// an artificial key for plant identification
5 obsolete : artful, cunning
Definition 2 doesn't apply, or if it does it's a bit of a stretch.
Definition 3 clearly applies. So, "lacking in natural or spontaneous quality".
So, what "amplification" activities on Twitter have a natural or spontaneous quality? Intentional clickbait or flamebait? Using tools to schedule posts in advance to maximize engagement? Jumping on trending hashtags? Paying a person to manage a Twitter account for you? Setting up a bot to automatically post articles from a website? All of these are allowed and can be used to amplify information, but none sound "natural" or "spontaneous" to me.
The meaning is clear and Twitter's rules are (IMO) very reasonable, but there is definitely something euphemistic about the phrase. The literal phrase would be "disallowed amplification", because the only real criteria for what is considered "artificial" are Twitter's own rules for what is allowed and what is not.
From wikipedia (or a reading of the book) "Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will."
What you are reacting to is a technical term that Twitter uses to describe a type of activity that they have found on their network. Specifically, using bots and fake accounts to create the impression that a message is popular or being retweeted by actual people.
As noted elsewhere in this topic, Twitter has an actual definition[1] of what this means.
There isn't really any reason to be confused by the wording of the reaon for the account being deactivated.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak [1]:https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-mani...
Your wikipedia links references merriam-webster which says:
> propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/newspeak
Exactly the definition of "artificially amplifying information".
Newspeak is about destroying words to reduce the thought quality. The theory being somthing like: less precise words mean less precise thoughts.
This is the opposite of newspeak, this is creating new words association for new concepts (artificially amplifying information here meaning buying bot comments, retweets and likes). You can agree or disagree, you can find that this formulation lead to misinterpretation (i do), but this is not newspeak.
It's like Jordan Petterson reading of 1984. This really, really angers me. Even with people i kind of agree with. Maybe people should buy a text explanation of Orwell, as this is far from the easiest anticipation book to understand (the US government pushing of this book proves that really well) or read his experiences and how they translate in his books. And maybe tehy should re-read the books too. Winston's job was to remove words from the dictionary, not add new one.
I'm sorry, this is not personnal, but this is the 4rth time THIS WEEK that i hear someone talk to me about newspeak and being dead wrong about it. One of them critizing adding (ADDING ffs!) a new word in a dictionary. This had to come out.
Agree with your sentiment I guess. Don't use the term newspeak though, this is imho disqualifying.
When lazy or dishonest or weak arguments are used, I get more upset if it’s in support of things I agree with than things I don’t.
It undermines the position and makes it that much harder to discuss it in the future because I now have to disentangle from that on top of actually making a proper argument in favor of the position.
Yeah, and the "that's a 'slippery slope' fallacy" rebuttal is often addressing something that is an actual slippery slope a lot of the time it's rolled out. Pointing out a slippery slope by itself isn't proof that the thing in question isn't real or isn't bad. Slippery slopes are real, and are quite often bad.
As for twitter, their focus removing on information that is damaging to people in power is concerning. These days private corps wield as much or more power than governments.
The post you are responding to also refers specifically to the Slippery Slope Fallacy[1] which is a different beast than just calling something a 'Slippery Slope'
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Consolidation_of... [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
My point is this, don’t turn off critical thinking because something is a so called fallacy.
Please, stop cargo culting logical fallacies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485514.
I expect to see more of these accounts suspended in coming days.
I can’t wait for you guys to defend spammers with “Gmail censors informative vendors who are trying to honestly sell Viagra and Cialis to suffering people”