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Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

> But there’s also a larger thing here where Twitter apparently has moderation tools so powerful that they can immediately trigger bans for things other than what they’re actually looking for. The actual execution leaves a lot to be desired here, but the itchy trigger finger cannot be denied. Somehow they can do this, but racial slurs are generally pretty okay, white supremacy is largely ignored, and every Twitter troll I’ve reported for harassment gets a three-week investigation and then a “We find they did not violate our rules” email.

This is one of the things that annoys me most about major sites like Twitter or YouTube. Inconsistent enforcement of rules and little to no avenue for appeal.

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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.

Twitter is entitled to deny service to anyone for any reason. Why should there be compensation for "accidental" bans?

They're entitled to, but such a policy might help retention. If there was a competitor that had a wrongful banning compensation policy, I would consider using them over Twitter.

Though I feel a bit silly thinking Twitter cares about retention.

Do you really think it is the best interest of society to give megacorporations free reign to dictate who can use our most popular communication platforms that have captured the market to the extend that many are only reachible via those platforms. We don't let electricity and water companies just cut people off because some machine learning algorithm though those people did soemthing wrong.

If twitter does not want the responsibility that should come with administrating the public square than THEY can find something else to do.

Yes, it is in the best interests of society to let these corporations run their businesses without regulating speech and associations. That becomes a really slippery slope, where the state starts saying what is & isn't allowed to be said, or who is or isn't allowed to be on a platform. A democratic & free government doesn't generally get to dictate what is said or who someone does business with except for national security reasons. Freedom of association is a pretty common right, even more than freedom of speech (which has limits).

The "capturing of the market" that some people are only reachable by that platform is nonsense. There are literally hundreds of physical and digital mediums of communication.

Facebook and Twitter are barely teenagers. Twitter is not doing well, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shrank to a niche in under a decade. Facebook as we know it also is not doing well, though they'll take longer.

If you only see an accidental ban in this story, you need to reread the story. Twitter, by way of its employees, violated its own policies in the follow-up.

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.

Depends who bans you on Reddit - i.e. moderators on individual subreddits have leeway to make those places whatever they want them to be.

It reminds me of zero tolerance of violence policies at school, where the victims would often be punished instead.

Maybe 10 years ago this was true, but Reddit today is heavily censored at the admin level.

>You can basically advocate for genocide, completely unhindered, by calling entire classes of people "degenerate" (literal Nazi rhetoric),

Are you sure you're not reading too much into it? Without context it's really hard to tell whether a use of "degenerate" literally means you want to genocide some group.

When folks call trans people "degenerate", as many are wont to do on reddit (and as reddit is well known for), it's probably safe to assume they're not just trying to be playful.

Yes, but there’s a Grand Canyon sized gap between being “playful” and calling for literal wholesale murder. I think there’s room somewhere in there for an interpretation like “that person is a super hateful asshole”.

> When folks call trans people "degenerate", as many are wont to do on reddit (and as reddit is well known for), it's probably safe to assume they're not just trying to be playful.

Can you link to such comment that was left unmoderated on reddit despite being reported?

I don't have hate speech bookmarked, sorry.

> I don't have hate speech bookmarked, sorry.

Surely you have instances of the hatespeech you claim that wasn't moderated upon report. Transgenders are probably the most protected group on reddit, so much that questioning their arguments even respectfully is banned from that website. Nobody asked you to bookmark anything, but you need to source your claims.

> Transgenders are probably the most protected group on reddit, so much that questioning their arguments even respectfully is banned from that website

This is demonstrably false, literally any r/ukpolitics thread with a trans-related headline will contain a ton of respectful disagreement and then plenty of open prejudice too.

If we're being honest, be honest, don't twist a narrative the other way.

> If we're being honest, be honest, don't twist a narrative the other way.

Yes, let's be honest, that's why I asked the parent to source their claim and all I got is a lazy cop out.

Does "degenerate" only imply genocide when referring to trans people or has it always implied that? I never got the memo on this one.

Reddit admins are part of the problem in addition to the users.

I actively used to participate in r/machinelearning with long posts & explanations, but the admins show often some favoritism to their buddy posters & I have seen good posts get called out or viciously dissed by regulars. Everyone seems to have an 'active duty Superman' complex desperate to pounce on each other & prove them wrong. The sarcasm is toxic behind the anonymity (HN can be anonymous too - but a lot of us here are pretty open of who we are outside of HN).

I was booted (or whatever they refer) from the sub for calling out a contentious post where the admin responding was definitely wrong in siding with it (but nevertheless exercised his privilege). Long since deleted the account for good.

Not to detract from your story, but it sounds like you are talking about subreddit moderators, not reddit admins. Subreddit moderators are unpaid and only control content on the subreddits they moderate, whereas admins are reddit employees and have full administration powers.

There are problems that come from both of them, however moderators are often the petty power hungry types.

Thank you. Yes that's what I meant. I have been out of the loop long enough to miss these terminology details. Thank you for correcting.

> 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.

Yeah, you'd have to link to that comment that went unmoderated. Given how petty reddit mods are about identity politics on main subs, I'd wager that this sort of speech doesn't fly there...

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