Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social
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Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.
Why would they draw attention to this tiny competitor with the entirety of their media attention?
Don't you think that Twitter knows that they have a lot of watchdogs?
Assuming malice by default is the very least we could do to fight back.
For example, a cop can be incompetent when accidentally firing a gun at a person, and they can be punished for the mistake, but the victim is already dead.
My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior.
Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings.
Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm.
Since we can't ask a corp its intentions, it's fair to judge them for the consequences of their actions.
I.e. never give a corporation the benefit of the doubt. They’re the most important producers of our economy, and doing so allows them to be lazy (aka the complete opposite of “productive”)
Design the system in a way that it'd pick up competitor links as spam (without directly blacklisting them explicitly) using fine-tuned training data.
In case of media attention, tell it's an error and ML algorithms are blackboxes, and take action to "whitelist" those domains only when needed.
Yeah, we buy it, Twitter.
Wouldn't it be much easier to simply blacklist and put out some bland statement about "not supporting 'hate speech'" or something? It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it just matters that they paint the picture of them opposing something "bad". Lying just seems a lot easier than going to all of that effort.
It doesn't require more work than they are already presumably implementing for spam detection (unless I way too much overestimate big tech's abilities), it's a little touch to an already-being-implemented system with a bonus of being able to block competitors to some extent, without direct liability.
It's dead obvious that they do not want it. The reasons why is beyond me.
Someone whose job it is made a few mistakes. you must have made a shit ton of mistake too. Claiming otherwise is stupid.
What you and i can pinpoint on twitter spam is independent of "everything is evil". Difference.
Twitter is just too powerful with all those engineers and access to ML to have this just as a mistake.
Whoever is responsible for that flagging is either:
- Incredibly incompetent and not knowing what they were doing (which I honestly don't want to believe)
- Knew exactly what they were doing and it's intentional with a benefit of doubt with plausible deniability.
Unintentionally blocking a whole domain "by mistake" falls into the first point above.
Knowing track record of social media companies hiring good engineers and being evil, also knowing Mastodon being a competitor to Twitter, I don't think I need to tell much more.
I find this to be a stupid way to look at things. Incompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive.
Very good point. The latter may be used to distract from the former.
Seriously? This is absolutely trivial: you don't build a system like this in the first place, as whatever is failing here--and 100% if it is a system actively designed to prevent people from posting links to their own timeline--isn't providing value: it is just a bigger surface in which there are going to be random bugs and false positives. I will thereby repeat: building systems that occasionally set themselves up for mistakes IS THE MALICE. I am not claiming that making a mistake is malicious, or that only malicious people make mistakes: we all make mistakes, so we should thereby do everything we can to limit our power and refuse to build systems that might fail.
(edit: I added a paragraph here but it came after a reply, so I moved that paragraph--without further edit--to my comment reply to that reply comment.)
I'm a little lost at what your point is because if you think the above is malice, there's malice in every poorly implemented feature. Say Instagram does a rough check to ensure no nudity is contained in the images you're posting and that system goes down preventing you from posting to your own IG -- that too is malice?
This is known as cloaking.
Safe thing to do is to block the submission instead of letting it through anyway, or potentially downrank the tweet, or graylist or whatever, or put it into failed queue for investigation, or something along thoselines.
I think crowd here would be delighted when twitter allows spam links because they figured out a way to fool the preview service in some ways.
Regardless, if it IS a mistake, we can assume Twitter will offer a formal apology indicating that they made a mistake that accepts fault for the impact it had on others, explain how they think that mistake occurred in enough detail that we can agree that it was a mistake and not an excuse, they will take steps to prevent that similar mistake from happening in the future, and they will further attempt to "make it right" somehow to the mastadon community (particularly so, as this was a competitor) with some extra benefit or concession... right? I will note that going around making mistakes and neither apologizing for them not taking responsibility for them--instead just flippantly hiding behind "we all make mistakes" while continuing to put yourself in a position where your mistakes matter to people--is itself a malicious act.
Some features are definitely not worth the complexity they impose. Sometimes a feature is so important you need to add it despite the systemic risk that it obviously carries.
Most of the time the designer or implementer doesn’t stop to even consider this analysis and just fires off some code to add the feature and lets it become “technical debt” because it’s SEP at that point.
The best engineers have an immediate intuition about these types of features and a visceral reaction when asked to code them. Something along the lines of, “I have a bad feeling about this” to “No way I’m coding this, it’s a metaphorical bridge just waiting to collapse.”
If malice requires intent I think most of the time there isn’t actual malice. If malice can stem from ignorance then I fully agree with you.
You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.
When there is feedback loops involved (in the context of an integrity system, for example), it doesn't outright block everything. In the past work i had our systems blocked some publishers traffic wrongfully, while not blocking others when it should(i was in display ads).
I sure wish the bugs in my code ended up benefiting my company :)
Twitter may die, but i don't think mastodon would grow as much as you make it sound.
But assuming everything is of that nature is what I am against.
"sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct.
What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?
Let's kill it, board said.
Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?
Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...
Speaking from experience: 1. size of mastodon is such a small thing that i doubt twitter even worries about it, among other things they have to worry about - like monetization. 2. My guess is integrity system incorrectly marked a url or link crawler/preview/whatever service is failing to crawl the page, or something along those lines. It can be something else, but my overarching claim is that it was not someone going into admin UI and typing mastodon to block them explicitly to cut the competition out. It may still be a lowly paid employee incorrectly doing something, but it's not for cutting the competition out and very very likely an honest mistake.
That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.
What of it? Are you actually so naive to think things aren't working against us?
The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.
It doesn't even matter why as long as twitter is aware of it, and it gets fixed soon.
When I go to X department store, they'll happily look up how items are priced on their website for price matching, but they won't look at the website for Y department store to whom they would also price match. Is that anti-competitive?
That's a long way around to what level do businesses have to help you in sending you to a competitor?
Antitrust laws is not about waiting for a monopoly to establish itself and then deconstructing it, but about preventing one.
> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.
Who are these partners, that apparently have the ability to block links on twitter?
Edit: attempting to save the tweet as a draft results in a different error: "The content of your Tweet is invalid."
I also believe some profile had been used as C&C, which could have caused the blacklist.
Give it a day, move along.
FTFY
Their API you can pretty much do anything pretty easily, especially now with the new V2 API that expose a lot of features that were not available through an API just a few months ago. For example Twitter Bookmarks.
I had a good experience using that a few months ago to build a service that sends you a weekly email of your Twitter bookmarks to your email inbox because I always forgot about them:
Or, you know, skip sharing your personal data and use an RSS reader.
At some point when your scale is big enough and you are the dominant incumbent, whether something is due to wreckless accidents or intentional or "blind"/ignorant malice is a moot question. The responsibility is (and so too should the punishments be) the same. That must be treated as the necessary cost of operating at this scale.
I can see how some shady content had a similar URL/behavior that accidentally got this flagged (though I'm not a mastodon expert, so I might be wrong).
I'd wait a day to see if the problem gets fixed. Even if they fix it, we will never know if it was a real bug or they hoped there wouldn't be backlash for this "feature".
I think you just have to accept these days that when you go on an online platform you’ll see a few outrage mobs gathered around some tiny scrap of information. It’s like walking into a nightclub and asking people why they won’t drink more responsibly.
But "why" that "bug" was there in the first place is another issue.
Twitter doesn't have enough credibility left to deserve the benefit of the doubt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
(The suit was filed against Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, but it turned out that "dozens" of other tech companies got involved as well (Pando Daily had good coverage https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com... ))
I figure these guys will do whatever they think they can get away with.
I'm just pointing out that the "evil corps" stereotyped has been earned by past events. The folks who are suspicious of corporate behaviour and motives have their reasons.
I am mostly thinking attributing _everything_ to malice or profit is wrong. Even then, nearly almost everyone here is using one or the other big corp product for free or paying for it, which feels ironic too. Like yeah, evil, but i will continue to use it is a funny concept. Accept things with flaws, call out stupid or malicious behavior, just don't think everything is evil
Part of the problem is that different folks have different experience with and ideas about the folks running big corps, so we wind up over-generalizing and talking past each other. I did it myself above when I used "these guys" to mean a handful of bad actors, not the whole of all those companies' executive suites.
> Like yeah, evil, but i will continue to use it is a funny concept.
Yeah, I find that perplexing too.
Harmful to whom, Twitter?
It's not like they're cutting off the whole Fediverse. There are hundreds (thousands?) of mastadon instances and none of the others will be affected by this.
On a serious note, do we know if there are other links that are blocked; like facebook or instagram or even onlyfans?
(Twitter loves to hide off-site links in general. Leaving the site means you’re not scrolling down your timeline and potentially seeing ads any more!)
Do you have a source/proof for me?
Can’t even copy the url to paste into browser
After all, it’s their right to as a private company. Isn’t that how that works? Everyone always says that, and this is a case of that.
Unless I missed it, until you wrote this nobody had argued it wasn't their right to do this.
Or do you have something concrete in mind on what to replace it with? Because just repealing it would lead to a much different Internet than it is today — and not in a good way.
In the EU it works well: the only social networks that exist are American :P
In the EU that would be Digital Services Act, chapter two of which offers websites similar protection to the Section 230. It's gonna be voted on soon™.
At the moment the EU has precedence in the opposite direction, with an Estonian news site Delfi having been held liable for anonymous user comments made on their platform: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delfi_AS_v._Estonia
It's literally the dumbest idea possible.
Unless the aim was literally to destroy these large left-leaning, people-empowering, highly profitable, internationally reaching businesses.
Now imagine which political party and which geopolitical adversary would like to make the internet less liberal, silence the powerless, make American tax revenue lower, and make more space for authoritarian voices on the world stage.
But people-empowering? These large platforms are very much anti-democratic and anti-empowering people. Even more, subverting peoples wills about what they buy by managing what they see and algorithmically trying to guide what they should think is very much anti people.
Any people empowering is merely a side effect and not at all the purpose
As for "the purpose" of social media, I suppose a simple reductive answer would be "to make money", but there were (and I think still are) people who are idealistic about social media giving a voice to the voiceless, even if you think that, in practice, commercial messages and misinformation end up having a bigger and more negative effect.
A thought experiment I think is useful is to imagine how Western political discourse could have been shaped (by politicians and the traditional media) if grassroots movements couldn't form and raise awareness through things like "hashtag activism".[0] The fact that authoritarian countries invest resources in censoring or banning social media also seems to confirm that they see it as a threat rather than a harmless distraction.
What does Twitter have a monopoly on? Twitter users? By that definition by local dry cleaner has a monopoly on me.
Not being able to talk about it on existing social networks is basically a death sentence for growth. I saw it first hand.
The 80+ percent of Americans who don't use Twitter might be a start [1][2].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2013/11/04/twitter-ne...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/970911/monetizable-daily...
It might actually work in Chicago. They had a pretty active tech scene. Covid killed those mall adventures though.
Well, I’m just glad https://www.laarc.io is unblocked here now after many years.
It is really not early days for either of these 'alternatives'.
Why do people always use the term "private company"? Twitter is a publicly owned corporation. If the Musk deal goes through, it'll be private. But I'm not sure what work the word "private" is supposed to be doing.
What's the point in saying "private company" if 99.99+% of companies are private?
Different rules, laws, regulations, etc. apply to private sector vs public sector.
Specifically in this case, OP is implying that a theoretical public sector social network wouldn't be allowed to block linking to mastodon because of the second (EDIT: no, wait, first amendment!) amendment, but that Twitter is well within its rights since they are in the private sector. Whether that's true or not, I dunno.
I don't know how I feel about a well regulated Militia overthrowing the government to protect free software and open standards...
I dispute that the OP was implying or even thinking anything about a theoretical public sector social network.
Like I said, I don't know how far the first amendment would or wouldn't apply in this situation. In any case, it would likely have to be tested in court.
Is it?
Actually, no argument has been given why a government owned company couldn't block links to whatever the government wanted.
“There are two commonly understood ways in which a company is considered public: first, the company’s securities trade on public markets; and second, the company discloses certain business and financial information regularly to the public.
In general, we use the term to refer to a company that has public reporting obligations.”
They’re talking about $TWTR, not Amtrak.
The government actually controls companies. In fact they wouldn't exist as legal entities without the government.
I feel there is a common misconception that "private companies can do whatever they want", belied by the existence of government regulation, but nonetheless a misconception regularly employed to dismiss antitrust concerns, for example.
They're aware of the concept of law but frequently unaware of specific laws. ;-)
Is that statement sufficient to stop further nitpicking?
Almost every use of "private company" is in contrast to a publicly traded company. Except when people start talking about "rights", and then they're apparently using it in a different way, which I find very odd and ideological.
When I ask, Why do people always use the term "private company", this is somewhat of a rhetorical question. I'm not asking for an explanation of what "private company" means, as if I were an ignorant simpleton. That's the uncharitable reading of my comment. Rather, I'm asking for the justification of the use of "private company" as a rhetorical term in the defense of the actions of corporations. I see this rhetorical usage constantly.
Everyone knows that Twitter is a company. That Apple is a company. That Google is a company, etc. And everyone knows that these companies are not run by the government. None of this ever needs to be explained in an argument. So the question is, what rhetorical force do people think the term "private company" gives them in defense of corporate actions? Or maybe the question is, what's the psychology behind the use of this form of rhetoric?
There are various government regulations that do or could be applied to these companies. Antitrust is very relevant for the tech giants. Communications Decency Act. Whether these regulations actually will be applied to these companies is another question, but it's a legitimate debate that can't be simply dismissed by "private company, anything goes".
It's a publicly traded company. Not a publicly owned company. The owners of twitter are primarily private citizens/corporations, not public/government.
> But I'm not sure what work the word "private" is supposed to be doing.
Public = government. Private = not government.
But as other comments have already mentioned, you are confusing two different meaning of private/public.
No, I'm not not confused. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609113
> curl https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1532710931590959104
There is nothing of value in the static part of the html. For fuck's sake, there is no even title.
You are free to complain, criticise them, scream at these companies or protest, but like I have said many times before they will not change and it is futile to believe that they ever will as long as they 'moderate' or do whatever they want to do on their own platforms.
So unsurprising this is.
I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire.
In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't constrained. There are innumerable laws that regulate corporate behavior and these can be expanded at any time. Corporate behavior can be constrained without limitation if the public so chooses.
On this web site when I hear people talking about controlling what social media platforms do via regulation, most of the time it seems to me like passing a law where the government says the following journalists must have articles each week on the New York Times front page. (And none of them are actually going to be journalists so much as "journalists")
Other people see it more like passing a law saying the telephone company can't block your telephone access.
I guess my point is framing every discussion of social media as "regulation good or bad" isn't very useful.
Firstly, there is only one front page of each edition of the NYT, and the page has a very limited data/readability capacity. On Twitter, every user's page is a front page if you want it to be (although admittedly the recommendation of people/tweets by "the algorithm" starts to feel like an editorial decision, which invites further scrutiny).
More significantly, though, once an organization has built a social or telephone network, it is actually more expensive to disconnect or delete messages based on the opinions contained within them than it is to just allow them to continue moving between users. This is in contrast to the (physical) NYT, where editors necessarily have to whitelist every piece of content, and forcing articles past that whitelist has significant cost implications (even if no one reads them).
If you want to have full control over your property then do not incorporate and give the property to the corporate person. I can block links to mastadon on my truly private (ie, owned by a human person) website without consequence. "Private" corporate persons have more regulatory burdens for obvious reasons.
That's exactly what's going on right now
Not yet. Twitter is still a publicly owned company.
Of course it's not the first time. That's precisely why I'm making a big deal out of it, because I've seen it over and over. I'm suggesting that there's a kind of unwarranted ideology behind the usage that doesn't accurately reflect the legal reality, and gives the impression that companies have unlimited rights when in fact they're strictly regulated in countless ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609113
We could talk about Section 230, for example, which is obviously important with regard to Twitter and whether it can operate.
It feels to me like people are "working overtime" to handwave about "government owned companies", of which nobody has given any examples. Nor have they explained why a government owned company wouldn't have the right to block any links that the government wanted to block. If anything, a government owned company would probably be treated as exempt from some rules that apply to "private" companies.
> Nor have they explained why a government owned company wouldn't have the right to block any links that the government wanted to block.
It's the First Amendment. The USPS can't refuse to deliver a postcard because they don't like what it says, for example. If the government ran a user-generated content platform (which they shouldn't, and probably never will) they would be bound by the same requirements.
Not sure why you mention this when everyone in the comments here insists that publicly-traded and privately-held companies are both included under "private company" in this discussion.
> The USPS can't refuse to deliver a postcard because they don't like what it says, for example.
Well, it actually must refuse if the receiver doesn't like it what it says. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of... "the sender does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material into someone's home"
How is the difference relevant? Also, the USPS can refuse to deliver child porn. Indeed, Twitter itself must remove child porn.
> why are you doing this?
I think that "theoretical government run social network" is a total red herring. Everyone in the comments is trying to tell me that "private company" is somehow a useful phrase to distinguish from "government run company", and I think the phrase and the distinction is doing zero work. I'm just following along with the game and trying to explain that the government/non-government distinction doesn't even help the argument.
The fact that Twitter is not run by the government is irrelevant, and saying that it's a "private company" doesn't magically exempt it from government regulation that may affect what it can and can't do.
It's kind of funny, when a big corporation does something terrible, half of the time the defense is "a private company can do whatever it wants", and the other half of the time the defense is "the lawyers made them do it", which is the exact opposite and contradictory idea.
True. My original reply in this thread was to the user "rvz". Then you replied to my reply.
“There are two commonly understood ways in which a company is considered public: first, the company’s securities trade on public markets; and second, the company discloses certain business and financial information regularly to the public.
In general, we use the term to refer to a company that has public reporting obligations.”
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...