A Linux Command Got My Twitter Account Locked for Abuse and Violation

"Even if you didn't do it, just plead guilty and you'll get a reduced sentence"

No. Just one of many examples: https://twitter.com/littleblackLB/status/1530913184835457024

What's disappointing here is that human review either didn't occur, or failed to recognize that this wasn't a post that was intended to be caught by this filter.

I'm hoping that if Musk actually does end up buying twitter, it leads to larger uptick for Mastodon.

The long, IMHO, is that eventually the only solution is a truly decentralized system, much like DNS, that no actor alone can enable nor stop as long as other actors refuse to "fork" the namespace for a more restricted one.

That's what "freeing the code" ultimately means, and that comes down to a protocol at a basic level. Anyone (company, individual…) being free to implement whatever interface they want to it.

Then we'd likely move to observing and participating in this unimpeded common "mother / raw / source" stream of messages, through what I imagine would look like more-or-less-biased portals of sorts, culturally flavored aggregators, but ultimately unable to lie about true raw numbers.

Until we all agree about reality, there's no discussing it. That's why we need dumb pipes, neutral transport, much like the air is dumb in transmitting sight and sound. That's why we make protocols (as in RFC's), and every single internet-facing machine holds its little piece of HTTP land, of IRC land, tomorrow of <some Twitter-like land> (I know, it's Mastodon, but it's also not in reality as we speak. Ask your sales people about adoption rates and network effects).

Thus follows, IMHO, the answer to your question: Elon claims a lot of things but none guarantee such a free and fair space for communication that de facto puts him out of the loop as a necessary gatekeeper (notice how Mr. Musk's moral fairness or even good intents, as a "benevolent dictator" is Montesquieu's words IIRC, is actually irrelevant to the core question). Elon does not suggest that he would "protocolize" Twitter's operations such that the company would act as a central but ultimately _optional_ hub for the sake of a mission —and literally operation— bigger than itself: free and fair human communication (by which point who cares about their code since everyone else can check the raw data stream in countless replicas and redundant streams over the web). Twitter (Inc.) as the steward and creator of this protocol would actually become valuable over the very long term (think: E/P ratio, employer prestige, etc) because hosting a fair and free human communication is one hell of an important job that few institutions —ever in history, private or public— would ethically be able to manage. But it's now become military-grade or hospital-grade important to a free society. As I was saying in another thread, it's about time we manage some deontological framework for the field of information technology and its practice at large.

[PS: Not that I hold my breath for one second that Twitter as we know it is in any way willing let alone able to undertake such an ethical mission, nor do I dream for one minute that Elon would buy Twitter instead of going from scratch, were the above goals his. The true disruption will likely be menial at first and come from left of field.]

If you want to judge how much someone values free speech, look at how they treet the speech of people they dislike or whose speech might be to their detriment. Feel free to check how Elon Musk treats free speech within his companies, especially of employees trying to unionize.

Free speech for me but not for thee.

Serious question: Is Musk going to allow threats of violence on Twitter?

The joking tweet in question wasn't a real threat of violence, but it's likely that Twitter's flawed algorithm flagged it as a threat of violence. So what about real threats of violence? Will those not be moderated at all under Musk?

Musk also said he wants to crack down on spam. Which requires automated detection, due to the extremely high volume of spam on Twitter. Everything on Twitter has extremely high volume, making it impossible to moderate manually. But algorithms are very imperfect, so you get a bunch of false positives, or a bunch of false negatives, or both. I wonder how this problem will get solved?

Meanwhile, code written behind closed doors may rely on security by obscurity more than it should - especially in the cases of violation detection/spam/similar cases.

I don't know that I agree with this argument, but it's plausible.

This is especially true for spam bot detection. Bots don't need a "bug" in the code in order to "exploit" Twitter. A bot just needs to be not labeled by Twitter as a bot. So the goal wouldn't be to find a bug in Twitter's open source code but rather just see how Twitter decides what is a bot and what is a human, and then make the bot slightly more human-like. But nobody in the world has a "correct" test to decide what's a human.

"The Twitter violation algorithm took 3 minutes to detect, flag, lock my account, and send me an email. There is no way a human can read tweets so fast, so it’s a violation detection bot army doing at work. Doing this at scale means all tweets are following some fast regex, and likely, an AI is getting trained and making decisions."

"The Twitter violation algorithm took 3 minutes to detect, flag, lock my account, and send me an email. There is no way a human can read tweets so fast, so it’s a violation detection bot army doing at work. Doing this at scale means all tweets are following some fast regex, and likely, an AI is getting trained and making decisions."