A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

This is why you do not use a work/professional account for things other than work.

Your joking speculation that there may be a YouTube video on how to cut off your own leg was in fact correct. There is one from "the leg man" posted 4 years ago.

That is why you have separate business phone numbers and addresses that you should be ok with being public and are not actually used for anything serious security wise, so you don't care if it is 'breached', because it's already publicly listed.

This is a good response. If twitter shows they don't care about you enough to make careful moderation decisions, then leave them with their shitty toys and dark patterns. Saves me a visit to nitter.net.

You're not wrong about the "dense" thing, but it sure highlights the need to keep examining and reexamining the relationship between services like Twitter and e.g. censorship, governance, and the First Amendment. Nobody's breaking the law here, nobody's being unreasonable, I think, but this isn't a great balance of power.

Alternatively, we need people--nay... heroes--such as this, or bullies like Twitter get to run roughshod over everyone.

But they aren't sorry either. This guy appealed, and if a human at Twitter ever saw it, it was probably some overworked contractor who gets a strike for every appeal he lets through.

Yep-- if the appeal hit a human and got a quick "oops" sorry! that would be another matter entirely.

I wonder if they're using their obviously invalid "appeals" results to train the AI? ... so as time goes on it just gets dumber and dumber.

Yeah, heaven forbid you follow you company's policies as outlined for the appeal process, better to power-trip because someone who was banned from the platform, the harshest punishment your company has, is fully-expectedly-vocal about being mistreated.

This is a great illustration of why appeals processes are often not taken very seriously. Generally they're used to re-litigate the issue by people who do not even consider the possibility that they may have violated policies. The insults are just the icing on the cake.

Basically, the real people involved know that appeals processes are going to be subject to vast quantities of what amounts to spam.

“You” is Twitter

There's a lot of perverse incentives, people aren't punished for being trigger happy.

I remember in a subreddit, there was a discussion about Facebook "top posters". I replied it wasn't exactly news, and wrote about the "top posters" to the letters to the editor of a local newspaper in my childhood. One was a famous TV meteorologist who would always write rebuttals to young earth creationists, from a Christian perspective. One guy was leader of a tiny racist party who would write about how Yugoslav refugees would take over our country. Others still were just old cranks who had an opinion on everything.

The guy who owned that subreddit banned me over "doxing". I tried arguing, hey, they were public figures in their day, writing under full names (and location!), and they're long dead now anyway, but he either didn't want to admit he was wrong or was just terrified of losing the subreddit to the admins.

Ideally people would just quietly stop using Twitter and services like it en masse, but that's not going to happen, so it's reasonable for people to complain about mistreatment. And that's what this is: the author got banned for their post violating a 'revenge porn' rule when that's not even close to what they posted.

Twitter's content moderation didn't work here. It banned someone incorrectly. That person used the appeal process and was denied, even though the content in question unequivocally does not violate the cited rule.

Twitter has no obligation to host anyone's content, and they are within their rights to deny service to someone whenever and for just about whatever reason they want. But this is how you're supposed to handle it! If you've been mistreated by Twitter, you say something, people see it, and they take it into consideration when thinking whether they'd like to start/continue using Twitter.

>This is called “pride” and is historically recognized as one of the largest “problem creators” as far as emotions go

yep life sure is easy if you don't have a spine and accomodate to every little act of bullying thrown at you by modern society. It's not the guy who is wrong, it's the world that is wrong, it's good that he understands it.

The author refuses to take the 'clear path' because that isn't an actual solution to the problem of faceless organisations taking people's abilit to speak away, and he probably recognizes as someone who has an audience it's responsible to sa that out loud.

Wow, the author got falsely accused of posting revenge porn, a criminal act by the way, and your answer is take it? Why are you so intent on attacking the author’s character for simply defending himself?

Uhhh, the author did nothing wrong and broke no rules (and yet as pointed out rampant, violent hate speech lives without many problems on social media) . Someone getting slightly and innocently sassy after getting banned for posting a cat video is the problem the author is writing about. They're not trying to get a data with you or something.

What is the clear path? According to the article he properly followed all of Twitters procedures by appealing TWICE.

> I’m sorry, but this is your real problem, not Twitter banning you.

I’m sorry, but no it’s not.

This is called treating the cause instead of the symptom. More people should do it.

The alternative is to acquiesce to the false moral superiority of those in control.

> This is called "pride"

Yes. It's having some pride and not groveling to be allowed back on their platform.

I don’t see the “clear path” here. As many others explained, deleting the video would both be wrong and potentially problematic.

I find it really funny so many people are up in arms against this perceived “verbal abuse” and giving the author a lot of flake for this one single word. The “you” he filled out in the appeal form clearly refers to Twitter as a platform. Maybe it would be clearer if English actually distinguished between the plural form and the singular form of “you”, like in various other languages? Perceiving this as a personal insult is exactly a “pride” issue of the Twitter employee and some of the commentators here, not the author, who IMHO acted perfectly reasonably.

Putting up with the demands may be the easy way out for the individual in cases like these but I am thankful that there are people like the OP who stand up against it so that we hopefully won't have to put up with worse shit in the future. Abuse only ever stops when there is pushback.

What is the clear path?

That was my independent takeaway from the article. And requesting an appeal with the verbiage "you cannot possibly be this dense" is a poor way to treat people, especially when the author admits it was the AI banning, not a person, so it wasn't a front line person being dense in the first place.

> There is a clear path to getting unbanned from Twitter, but the author refuses to take it. Shame.

I disagree on the latter part, Twitter would be better without these egotistical people on it in the first place.

And engineers and PMs more than happy to look the other way when their creations go so wrong.

I can't help but wonder how much actual revenge porn is missed because their classifiers are this terrible.

The real stinger is that there's no legal requirement to compensate someone for wrongdoing. Ban someone by accident, and then in a "review" uphold the ban despite overwhelming evidence? That should be a fine, paid out in part to the wronged party.

Same thing on Reddit. You can basically advocate for genocide, completely unhindered, by calling entire classes of people "degenerate" (literal Nazi rhetoric), but get banned for calling it out.

Or, as suggested by another commenter, the AI is triggering off of the camera moving quickly downward while pointing upward, which is similar to upskirting videos.

I'm not so sure I agree.

The typical argument for AI moderation in these situations is something along the lines of "Twitter is so big how could we possibly moderate at this scale without AI?"

Does a company have a right to scale faster than it has the ability to properly moderate? Should they?

Looking at a more extreme example: If General Motors used AI to design cars and they increased the likelihood of fatalities, would we feel any different?

Human review is pretense, it costs more to do anything else. A human is told to process these as fast as possible, so the issue can be resolved. With these incentives, it wouldn't be reasonable to actually watch the videos in question. That's not what the system is designed to reward.

The human is there to rubber stamp the AI decision as fast as possible, so that Twitter can tell you your case has been reviewed by a human and settled. The important metric is speed, because that directly translates into cost.

It's telling that the AI doesn't just flag something, without banning it, and let a human do a proper review.

An AI arbitrarily banning someone for a completely innocuous post isn't broken?

Good human reviews are, well, nearly impossible at the scale of Twitter or Google. It would require employing hundreds of thousands of reviewers, training them, and paying them decent salaries for one of the most horrible jobs in the world. So, everybody is trying to automate as much as possible in this area. I am sure that in this case, if there is a human even involved in the escalation, it takes them a few seconds to decide on each case, with poor decision quality.

>In all other aspects of our lives, we do not accept rules imposed upon us by a large private actor. There are courts, and appeals processes, and politicians, and other channels through which we can assert our societal norms.

Out of curiosity, where do you live?

Where I live, I accept that my phone will receive unsolicited robocalls and texts, and that the majority of mail delivered to my address is, similarly, unsolicited waste.

Where I live, I accept that the marketing efforts of a coalition of firearms manufacturers carries more weight than schools littered with dead children, a thousand unarmed people shot to death by police every year, thousands annually killed in domestic situations or on street shootouts. There's also, of course, the #1 cause of death by firearm: suicide.

Where I live, a large private actor repeatedly abused the legal system throughout his career, and through a particular quirk in our bizarre republican democracy, was elected to the highest office in the land after losing a popular election by millions of votes. He continued to break laws while in office, but was never held accountable, and the second time he lost a popular election, went on to break more laws, along with his cronies and a crowd of supporters... There are myriad reasons why this private actor should be in jail, but the government where I live has largely been gutted of any regulatory power.

More often than not where I live, you have one choice of broadband provider, provided by a large private actor, who often times has worked with politicians to outlaw choice.

Maybe you live somewhere else, but where I live, we are reaping what decades of aggressive pro-business anti-government action has sown.

> These private companies should be considered access points to the social graph, not owners of it, and therefore regulated as such.

Okay, but how? Every time I see calls for regulation, I don't see any specifics.

Regulation isn't a magic wand that solves all problems you don't like while keeping the parts you want to keep. We got regulation for cookies, and now we're all doomed to click cookie banners on every website we visit forever.

What exact regulations would you apply to Twitter to solve this problem without forcing the companies out of business? Any solution that ends up requiring Twitter to fend off constant legal battles from people angry about being banned or requires scores of humans to moderate content to some government-stated standards or face expensive fines just doesn't work. If US websites were suddenly subject to onerous legal standards that weren't required elsewhere, companies would move their headquarters to other countries ASAP.

> These societal rules and norms, are, and should be governed by a democratic process.

By deleting your account at services that show such a licentious behaviour, you can cast your democratic vote against such services. Not doing this or at least starting or joining a huge riot against such services as soon as you hear about such licentious behaviour means casting a democratic vote that what the big tech company is doing is all right.

We want government to run or regulate these systems as long as we trust the government but what happens when we don't trust the government anymore?

Like for example if in this years midterms there's a Congressional supermajority, and then the president is elected from that same party two years later and the courts are of that party.

Will we really want government regulations if things?

There would be widespread mistrust by many groups of people of the government having a single party in charge.

Now that government regulations are established and approved they can be used by the government at their will.

If we go one step back, bars, clubs, pubs, discos, and churches/worship places were where a majority of people spent their socializing time in prior to social media platforms.

Those places would routinely throw people out and all had bouncers and sometimes gatekeepers for entry and all that.

There are certain specific patterns that we did regulate, like the tradition where certain gender or race weren't allowed in them. But generally, someone causing a ruckus gets thrown out.

>In all other aspects of our lives, we do not accept rules imposed upon us by a large private actor.

Sure Amtrak is government-run, but many other things we use on a daily basis aren't. Restaurants and stores have their own rules and can kick you out if they think you violated them, without much recourse for you if they were wrong.

I would be surprised if every initial appeal isn't deflected by automation, as first step, just to fend off "annoying users" and get rid of those who don't care.

The author responded in the appeal with "You cannot possibly be this dense."

If you want to win an appeal, starting by accusing your appeal reviewer of being dense isn't a good strategy.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have a rule that covers this type of behavior in appeals, and the appeal was denied due to language instead of the content itself.

Is it fair? From a content moderation perspective, no it's not. But I can also see why a platform would not be in a rush to restore accounts where the appellant can't even behave nicely in a two-sentence appeal.

It’s Mechanical Turk. Although Mechanical Turkey sounds cooler. :)

A simpler technique which already exists is embedding invisible unique watermarks in the video output of the game, which can be revealed with image processing[0].

Of course that doesn't prevent the image being tweeted, but it does mean they can punish the person who made the tweet, which might be enough of a deterrent in most cases.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/p319oj/if_...

I couldn't see that having any demand from game companies. They generally want you to share gameplay footage so other people will see it and want to play too, even preventing spoilers isn't worth burning your customers like that. But I could see it getting demand from people who want to use it as a weapon.

Same here, I am connecting from Turkey and we are also banned.

    We've discontinued servicing users from your location and are thereby preventing access to any of the websites owned and operated by ZAM Network, LLC DBA Fanbyte (the owner of Fanbyte.com):
    This decision is ultimately one we were forced to make due to the number of visitors from your region when compared to the operational costs necessary to continue providing access there. It was a tough decision but one that we ultimately had to accept. This is an indefinite decision. We genuinely apologize for the inconvenience this will cause all of those who reside within your region.
    Note: This is not related to Russia/Ukraine or any other political/military actions around the world.
    If you need to reach out to us, please use our support portal.

If you’re unable to access your email notification settings related to the account you’re locked out of, and have received any non-transactional emails related to the account, you can email their legal team regarding a CANSPAM violation to get a real human on the case (or a payday if they choose not to respond). May not apply to your circumstances; just throwing it out as I’ve had it work before in a similar context.

> Why is the consequence account suspension?

Good question.

It feels Orwellian that Twitter suspends you and makes you delete your own tweet, on first offense, instead of just auto-hiding that one tweet.

Calling the support staff "dense" was probably not the right move..

In my circle of friends and family, I’ve been warning them every time I hear of someone unjustly banned somewhere that:

(a) big tech has too much power (b) you should probably not rely too much on Facebook or Twitter for photos, groups, etc

Without fail, I’m “just delusional” and “if someone was banned, it’s because they did something to deserve it”, _until_ they themselves get banned for something.

The most frustrating part - one friend of mine who was banned for something he posted, appealed and was reinstated. When he was banned, “big tech has too much power”, but since _his_ appeal was successful, he’s already back to “anyone who’s banned deserved it”.

I have yet to be banned myself for anything (a fact that my critics like to use as “proof”), but i recognize that if it can happen to someone posting a video game clip, it can happen to me.

Most likely not. This is most likely a machine learning model that has a confidence score of pornographic material etc. and has mis-scored this post high enough to initiate an automatic suspension.

I doubt they use prior account activity as a metric.

From https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/a-good-tip-for-peopl...

The following countries have been blocked from accessing any of the websites owned and operated by ZAM Network, LLC DBA Fanbyte (the owner of Wowhead. com):

China Indonesia Philippines Thailand Turkey Serbia India This decision is ultimately due to legal compliance and liability issues with respect to these countries and their laws/regulations. This action was not based on any specific law or regulation in any one or more of the listed countries. Our decision was due to the legal costs involved with reviewing the laws and regulations of the listed countries, in contrast with the amount of visitors/revenue earned from them. As a result of this analysis, we decided not to pursue a legal review and to mitigate our liability in these countries, we opted to block access entirely. This is an indefinite decision. I and the rest of the Wowhead staff genuinely apologize for the inconvenience this will cause you. It was a tough decision but one that we ultimately had to accept.

I hit a very similar message several times when I was traveling in Colombia, including on websites that I specifically needed to access to plan my further travel. It's extremely annoying. I suspect there is some button on Wix or a WordPress plugin that webmasters are naively using to fight spam that's inadvertently locking out legitimate users from certain countries.

It's a really big step backwards for the idea of a "world wide web" and global internet, imo, and plays right into the hands of authoritarian nations who are trying to sell developing countries on the idea of "internet sovereignty".

So they host articles that complain about being banned on Twitter, but are ok with banning entire countries?

I'm getting the same message from the OP's website, and I'm in eastern europe. Weird.

From India, I too got the same message.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220723125013/https://www.fanby...

Could you please elaborate? Twitter stopped working with particular ISP because of cost related problems?

Eh... It's no big loss. I can live without it.

I was Googling around for why this might be. The best I can guess is that it has to do with the Thai PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act) that recently started getting enforced. This is the equivalent to the EU's GDPR act, but whereas it might be worth it to Fanbyte to take steps to comply with GDPR, the Thai market may not be a big enough part of their readership. This is just speculation.

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform.

And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough humans alive to moderate all content on all platforms.

But, the law goes "well figure something out, you have to moderate", and now we've by law guaranteed that whatever solution that gets implemented to follow the letter of the law is going to be shit, because it's by definition going to be automated content moderation, and given the volumes involved, it's modern neural-net based because that's the only technology that's even remotely shown it has an over 50% success rate.

Well done, us.

When you say moderate without AI are you suggesting human moderation? This is not really a good solution to this problem either. Paying people to traumatize themselves by watching video after video or reading tweet after tweet of the worst content society has to offer is dehumanizing.

Per the article, there was a human involved in an appeal for this matter.

I don't think it's even the money anymore.

I think technologists are convinced they are ALMOST there with automoderation systems...just a few more data points and another thousand hyperparameters and it'll be perfect!

I think they've yet learn to recognize the good because they're too busy dreaming of the perfect.

Do you think that Twitter could possibly survive as a company without large amounts of automated moderation?

I think this is a fair assessment.

Big social media companies are not incentivized to care about psychological and social side effects of their product.

A bit like cigarette companies offloading externalities onto society, but much harder to specifically identify and address.

One complaint is that moderation gets worse when dealing with less common languages/cultures.

Not long ago there as an HN post about someone being banned for being Syrian (sanctions) when they were speaking in Syriac.

For a non-native English speaker, Syrian (Arabic) and Syriac (an ancient language not spoken for over a thousand years) is really hard to know.

There are going to similar mistakes in every language. Getting a native speaker for some languages is borderline impossible.

Some languages don’t even have native speakers (Syriac, for example).

I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.

Here's a fun story. I see that this post is from fanbyte.com.

Existing got me banned from fanbyte.com and all of the websites they own.

Specifically, existing in a particular country. Not an exotic or unusual one on an embargo list or something -- just some country that Fanbyte felt they weren't earning enough profit from.

They banned the entire populations of about ten countries from their entire network of websites earlier this year, for that reason.

If this guy who got banned from Twitter works for Fanbyte, I have no sympathy. I'll never know the details of the story though, because Fanbyte is out there banning entire nations.

Eh, I don't buy the public square argument.

The online world is a cesspool filled with bots and crazy people. I don't need to voice my opinion on Twitter, nor is Twitter a place I need to be.

What matters is how we relate to the people around us, in our communities. Your neighbor isn't a bot, the barista at the coffee shop isn't a russian troll. We need to stop taking the "online world" so seriously and connect with the people around us more.

Not to mention the Orwellian proposition: "delete the pic we deemed wrong so we can unban you". Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic, it's better to teach you a lesson and make you do it.

There are four lights

> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations

Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here. And like any business, they choose to deny service to some users (and not all users agree on this). Also, there are multiple such private spaces.

Maybe the real solution is just like in the physical world, there should be state owned online spaces that are real "public spaces" and denying service here would be the govt denying rights.

Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms.

I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.

> A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it.

Growing up in Birmingham, AL I had a couple teachers who had dog bites and remembered the hoses from when they tried to shout out whatever they wanted in public squares. It's always interesting how people have such a rosy view of history when it comes to forming a much beloved but not well thought out belief.

There are plenty of public places in the US, but the so-called "public square" where strangers gather to debate is a total myth. It does not exist anywhere, and I'm not sure it ever has existed. Certainly not in my lifetime, anywhere I've ever lived.

Friends do gather in public squares to talk or lounge or listen to concerts or whatever. But the kind of thing that happens on Twitter, or on HN for that matter, does not happen IRL. Occasionally there's a crazy preacher who attempts to address a crowd of strangers, but mostly the crazy preachers get ignored or ridiculed. There's no real, serious discussion and debate in the public squares among people who didn't already know each other.

You can go to an open city council meeting to discuss and debate public issues, but those meetings are strictly governed by rules and moderated.

I always wonder why not just rely on the same user reporting and automation systems to downrank, gray out, hide from indexing, mark content as controversial, instead of banning entire user accounts?

Then repeat offenders can be banned with good reason. It seems absurdly heavy handed to remove legitimate accounts, irreversibly and without recourse, for a single post or comment, this should not be legal.

> I would love to know a way this can be solved

Step 1. Hire humans and pay them enough to think (and communicate with customers).

Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Those can be useful when escalating a dispute (to another human from Step 1, but someone with more authority to make judgement calls).

Detection algorithms can still be used, but they should only be to flag potential bans. Any actual action taken must be done by a human from #1.

Done.

>> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture.

It's possible that the answer is for society to simply go back in the other direction. Despite the initial promise of the Internet, it's possible it will never function as the new public square. Rather, we might have to go back to more traditional methods of expression, in physical spaces, or writing letters to elected officials.

Or perhaps a body of ethics could be developed similar to the body of ethics that guides journalists. But that body of ethics, for journalists, grew up at a time when the USA had many thousands of newspapers, and none were dominant, so the power of the profession was balanced against the relatively small power of any one newspaper. This was back before the New York Times and the Washington Post emerged as national papers. It would be more difficult to develop a similar body of ethics for social media, since the whole space has already consolidated down to 4 major corporations, and there is no obvious profession that can assert a body of ethics independently of those 4 companies.

The public square argument is a distraction and it goes nowhere. What needs to be called out is Twitter just being terrible at enforcing their own TOS, and the human review process apparently having no oversight or consequences for responses like the author received.

This is a straightforward problem of bad and inconsistent service quality.

> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture.

When a giant corporation says “here’s our private property, use it as your public square”, say “fuck off”.

There are many "public squares" in the world owned by corporations -- 592 in New York City alone including 168 plazas. They don't have the same protections for their users that a true public square has, but they're cheaper for the average voter, and that's what we care about.

Twitter is not the government? Twitter also is not really a public square, it's an advertiser-supported electronic press.

If I own a printing press, I have the freedom to print what I want, including what people send me, and I also can not print what I want, including what people send me. It's my press. Want different rules, get your own or use someone elses.

Because Twitter is a privately owned super-fast electronic press, administered at their whims, people should stop using it for things that matter unless they have an actual contract with the corporation. I don't rely on Twitter for anything other than entertainment.

The fact that people expect rights and meaning with advertiser-supported stuff given to them for free is what's harmful.

Now take this, and multiply it for Zuckerberg’s idea of a multiverse.

The thing with physical public squares is that they are self-regulated - if someone commits a crime, everyone runs away and someone calls the cops, and the offender effectively has their life ruined due to a criminal record. If someone goes around and starts yelling hate crimes at people on the street, they tend to learn their lesson when enough people take notice and confront the individual with a warning to stop.

Unless you bring in real identities onto twitter, none of those societal protections will apply to social media. Nobody can do anything to spam/bot accounts if it's 1000 accounts being created every minute.

> the online world is our current public square

That's right, and that's why virtually no one ever gets banned from using the internet. Twitter is not "the online world".

> This is how big tech does damage to humans.

This being whatever AI flagged his post. I would not be surprised. I'm seeing a trend where, Facebook, Discord and I guess now Twitter are trying to use AI to moderate. It is going to backfire hard. Lots of blatantly bad things stay on their platform, but innocent nonsense gets you banned. Either their content moderators are really bad at their job, or silently protesting, or there's an AI involved.

In my case someone posted a video featuring a giant spider on Facebook in a little girls hand, it was bigger than her face, my comment was a meme comment you see all over the internet "girl put that spider down we gotta set the house on fire" there's a recurring meme about burning homes to kill spiders due to arachnophobia. Innocent joke, not actually serious, I got a warning, I guess they thought I was actually advocating burning down a home, but I was not. I appealed and immediately not long after I was denied. There's an AI involved, and whoever does appeals is lazy or the AI itself, or has no concept of internet content memes.

It can be solved by realizing that private websites ARE NOT public fora.

They have never been, are not now, and will never be.

HN has, and will again, removed comments that I have made again, particularly if they stray too far from the party line regarding cryptobros, SEObros, and devs who whore themselves out to ad companies when they could be doing actual real work that benefits humanity while making just a little teeny tiny less money but whores are whores so they'll keep on keeping on.

I'm fine with that. And you should be too.

If HN was a public square I could tell them to fuck off. Nothing I said would meet any community standards and obscenity triggers in any courtroom in any jurisdiction of any court in all of the United States.

"Oh but HN isn't as big as Twit.." is bullshit and has been tried before. Anyone who makes this argument is so intellectually bankrupt they should be banned from the internet for being too stupid to operate an internet browser.

You have the same "public square" rights in Times Square that you have in Lotsee Oklahoma (0.02 mi sq), which is smaller than Times Square (0.25 mi sq).

Private parties can set arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unfair, and mean rules about what they allow on their platforms, and don't even have to set any rules besides "because we said so".

Anything less is tyranny.

edit: if public websites are TRUELY public fora, there could be a very strong argument made that hiding my comment due to downvotes is an assault on my rights, similar to covering my sign with a blanket as I try to agitate in ACTUAL, REAL, public squares for civil rights or the legalization of marijuana or the proselytizing of my TIMECUBE religion. Unless, of course there exists "important and real" free speech and "not important" free speech but allowing for that distinction is probably more dangerous than having no free speech at all...

I had felt the same in 2015 when I got banned from Facebook for not providing my real data (they asked me to provide a photo of my ID which I thought and still think was silly). But then I realised how good it was for me (as a user) and started thinking maybe we should aim to go back to the 'small Internet'. By this I mean small forums, maybe chat rooms or something of that sort. I often go back in memories to the late 90's and remember how I felt using the Internet back then. Of course this is nostalgia, but sometimes I wonder if I can build something to get that feeling back.. like island of the 90's internet

These megacorporations answer that you're using a 'private platform' - the answer is to use a public platform.

https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E

One way to look at this is that the natural state of things is that everyone has access to the local public square, and only a few have access to regional or national public squares. The early internet was a perturbation in this natural state, giving millions access to nationaland global distribution of their thoughts for no cost, but natural law is bringing us back to a steady state where you can only reach your friends, colleagues, and neighbors unless you make a career out of journalism, celebrity, big business, or politics.

Twitter is not "the public square". It is a night club.

Confusing private, for-profit businesses for public assets does a disservice to, and leads to ideas that are damaging for, both.

> A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards.

Just beautifully written. Do you happen to have a blog?

I only ever hear complaints from far-right people who want their speech to be free-er than other people’s or entities.

Where are the legal recourses? Are EULAs that ironclad? And should you lose all "your" data?

It should be a law that days bans from companies must allow you to download your data, especially snt Publix presence site.

>I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel.

Easy. Stop banning people unless the content is illegal. Stop acting as moral police. Let the community police itself by burying offensive content. Give users absolute control over what they see. And ban bots.

This “problem” only exists because Twitter wants to control what you see.

These global public squares didn't exist until social media so I don't consider it a human right.

That's a real issue. It's not just a monopoly in a competitive sense but also a monopoly on 'public squares'. Which is effectively against free speech.

When a company or moderator has the power to ban you from a public space your are ostracized by a non-democratic panel, with unknown agendas.

I am so tired of the public square analogy. You don’t need Twitter. You don’t need Facebook. You don’t need Reddit. And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned.

If you think it’s ok for a restaurant to turn you away because of a dress code, then this is a non-issue. The are several major platforms you can use as a megaphone, just like you have plenty of restaurants to choose from for your meal. If you are systematically getting banned from each social media platform and being “cut off from the public square,” that says more about you than it does the current state of speech.

You want to push content in a decentralised fashion? Run your own website, and provide an rss or atom feed so people can use their own aggregators. We've had this tech since the 90s.

It involves effort, though - not much effort, but a little more than posting on Twitter, Tumblr or wherever; and this, it turns out, is sufficient.

> I fight hard to read the web in my way.

Turns out most people posting content don't want to fight hard to post it, and most people reading content don't want to fight hard to read it, and this is why twitter, facebook et al are big things, rather than everyone just having their own sites and decentralised syndication.

If something else is to take twitter's place, its barriers to entry must be at least as low as twitter's.

> I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.

Spammers and griefers historically conquer that kind of environment. Usenet fulfilled virtually all of your freeness criteria and now it's a cesspool of spam and worse. Everyone worth talking to has left. Moderation is necessary for quality discussion, or selective membership, or more likely both.

You can make a Merkle tree of signed comments but the problem was never the integrity of the messages (I don't recall anyone messing with the contents of existing Usenet messages) or relationships between them (the worst practical problem was bottom-quoting).

The order of a "feed" is adjusted by the rate at which spam is generated; spam will always be the first result in the feed because that is spammers' objective and they have automated resources to achieve it.

Why does it need to be "web3" and not "RSS"?

But a true web3 is possible: not through blockchain and things like that, but through things like WebRTC, Bittorrent and protocols of that sort. Peertube is one example of something of that sort.

A revival of a noncommercial, and uncommercializable web.

Are you young? Because, we once had the web3 you're describing about. Back when P2P was a trending technology, we implemented most of the web on peer to peer mesh network. File sharing, forum, web pages, we had it all. The conclusion is, it was so inefficient most people don't want to use it. That's why people of today use Hacker News rather than P2P forum, trusting the central authority that is Y Combinator.

Are you regularly using these P2P mesh network based communication tools? If not, you won't see the web3 future you are looking for. You don't get a future you don't want to use it regularly.

> ...By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like?

1. Isn't it how web1 work? 2. Who's going to pay for the storage and bandwidth? 3. As long as you hare hosting something on planet earth, the server is bounded to be governed by a country. And I am sorry to say, if a piece of content is considered illegal to the government of the country where the server is physically located, they can shut it down, no?

You can use a redirector extension to change twitter to nitter links.

I don't think web3 solves any of the problems you're mentioning in a real world way, which is probably (a part of) why you get strong reactions here.

There are a few of these platforms now, like hive, lens protocol, member.cash or deso.

I've always thought that was the most plausible of the dystopias, and it's the most terrifying, because there's literally no way of avoiding becoming a target of the state (or whoever it might be assuming state-like functions).

I suppose it’s possible someone would make this up, but having dealt several times with erroneous content removal / account blocking from FANG companies, the story rings true.

E.g. I’m currently banned from Google Ads because they “detected suspicious payments” without ever trying to charge my card (the same card I use without issue for GCP and Google Workspace). They’ve denied three appeals without any information and still won’t tell me how to fix it. I have a feeling I’ll have to write one of these blog posts to make anything happen.

The full video that supposedly causes the auto-ban is in the article, so I decided to just try it:

https://i.imgur.com/WEP4dcV.png

I assume "additional tasks" means needing to delete the tweet to be unsuspended, as the author described.

"We don't see the other side" is perhaps literally the biggest problem.

I will have sympathy for this process when they choose to tell us how it all works, clearly and plainly. Otherwise, let the metaphorical rock-throwing continue.

What are you arguing here? That twitter is good at moderation because we simply can't see it behind the scenes?

I can think of hundred different ways this could have affected someone negatively, especially if they weren't able to speak with support in native language.

So c'mon, there is no excuse for this ban to take place, and then continue to be banned after the first appeal, statistics or not.