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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

> But when the BBC used the in-app system to report 30 accounts featuring children begging, TikTok said there had been no violation of its policies in any of the cases. After the BBC contacted TikTok directly for comment, the company banned all of the accounts.

> It said in a statement: "We are deeply concerned by the information and allegations brought to us by the BBC, and have taken prompt and rigorous action.

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TikTok is notoriously inconsistent in the application of its TOS. One person I follow was set up as a partner (which includes things like bank accounts and drivers licenses), yet their account was banned for the personality being under 13 (she's 31). The remedy? Send a picture of the drivers license TIkTok already has associated with the account to prove her age.

there's literally a whole genre of live trolling where you try to get people who are obviously under 13 or close enough to say so and they get banned hella quick usually.

Turns out that TikTok, like many other companies, is made up of individual humans, and not some all powerful uni-mind.

>> TikTok is notoriously inconsistent in the application of its TOS. One person I follow was set up as a partner (which includes things like bank accounts and drivers licenses), yet their account was banned for the personality being under 13 (she's 31). The remedy? Send a picture of the drivers license TIkTok already has associated with the account to prove her age.

> Turns out that TikTok, like many other companies, is made up of individual humans, and not some all powerful uni-mind.

Though you'd think in a case like this, they'd have the ID on file or be able to easily infer from their account metadata that the person is over 13. It seems like more of a case of dumb one-size-fits-all processes or laziness on the part of the moderator.

These companies don't care about banning people because it's more profitable not to - unless you upset someone about a trendy topic like gender.

This week I reported someone on Twitter for telling me to kill myself ("Kill yourself" was their exact words). Twitter said they found this "Doesn't violate our rules".

Part of the problem is that TikTok appears to have relied far too heavily on automation for moderation. I was suspended for saying "America is worse" and also for saying "God isn't real". Many girls have been banned for showing their shoulders. But I guess those users aren't bringing in money like the ones taking donations.

>- unless you upset someone about a trendy topic like gender.

I am very active in the online trans sphere and let me tell you, they don't care about that either. The situation is not that any topic has a focus, the online moderation of sites of this size is simply flawed. Only clear hate speech is grounds for banning and muting. And even then, when I say clear, it's about keywords that trigger algorithms.

But “kill yourself” isn’t a keyword?

I suspect the majority of the "AI" for these moderation systems is "has this been reported by X number or Y% percentage of post viewers? then ban".

In my experience, the same string can result in different moderation based on unknown factors. For example, I used to report the trans slur of the "t" word and Facebook would remove the content. Now, when I report it, the comment stays posted. Maybe it has something to do with the age of the post or the number of positive reactions to it. Maybe I reported too much and the false positives resulted in my account being banned from reporting comments. Similar behaviors on other platforms.

> For example, I used to report the trans slur of the "t" word and Facebook would remove the content. Now, when I report it, the comment stays posted.

Isn't that also a slang term for a transmission? An automated rule for that that would probably result in far too many false positives: merriam-webster.com has the transmission sense as the first meaning, and has collected many very recent usages from auto magazines: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tranny.

I couldn't actually think of what the 't' word was until you said transmission - that's the context where I hear it FAR more often.

To be clear, I reported it under photos of people who are trans while it was used as a slur in comments that were derogatory. Usually, this would result in the comment being deleted.

This is only an example to show there is no conspiration about moderation of gender related topics. You get the same issues with other slurs and other topics.

Well, if "Please dont kill yourself" triggered the "kill yourself" algorithm, that might be a problem too.

An automated moderation system should be smart enough to detect sympathy. And if it's in doubt, it should leave it to a person - a native speaker of the given language, because a lot of these systems are trained on English and western language and sentiments.

"Please don't kill yourself" can mean "kill yourself" depending of the original post and poster.

I know that my comment is a trivial observation, but an automated moderation system capable of detecting sympathy sounds like science fiction. Frankly it seems like humans struggle at it.

> An automated moderation system should be smart enough to detect sympathy.

That sounds like a super hard natural language understanding task.

> And if it's in doubt, it should leave it to a person - a native speaker of the given language, because a lot of these systems are trained on English and western language and sentiments.

That costs lots of money that could be going to the shareholders or executive compensation instead.

What if shareholders themselves are tasked to do that stuff?

KYS has traditionally been a one way ticket to a twitter ban for sure.

With the impending Musk acquisition, perhaps the staff have lost their zeal and are preparing for more "free speech", as violent language and calls to violence online is often labeled.

Calls to violence aren’t free speech under any reasonable definition. At the same time, “violent language” feels like a contradiction in terms.

yeah it is but "k1ll your$self" or whatever got through for a while, then it was "unalive", then "un@1ive" or sm when that got filtered, i've even seen "commit queen elizabeth".

trying to filter automatically based on message is a retarded strategy.

> Many girls have been banned for showing their shoulders

I don’t use TikTok, but I thought TikTok was known to have a lot of videos of scantily clad women and girls dancing. Is that just a meme?

It's strictly no nudity, but with as much sexually charged activity as you can get away with.

Presumably automated tools just see skin, but are useless against innuendo.

It's more of a meme, but people are always looking for the boundaries.

There was one weird one that featured a teenage girl getting all kinds of wet things thrown on her to make the shirt cling (followed by some guy coming into view yelling and falling over for some reason?).

Keep in mind that there's a lot of teenagers (mostly boys) on there who really don't need much to get excited.

I don't use tiktok and haven't seen the videos so this is just a guess, but my first thought is they were doing the old hollywood trick of showing bare shoulders with the rest of their body out of frame, maybe covered with a bubble bath, to imply nudity without actually being nude.

I was suspended for saying "America is worse" and also for saying "God isn't real"

What is it about TikTok that makes you go back to it at least twice after being suspended?

If I was suspended from a platform for doing something innocuous, I don't think I would go back, only to be suspended again, and then presumably return once more.

I'm not on TikTok, so I don't understand its value. But is the content really so good as to subject oneself to that kind of arbitrary treatment?

You're saying this on HN, which has explicitly opaque moderation and a history of arbitrary soft-banning people on moderators' whims.

>These companies don't care about banning people because it's more profitable not to

That's why they banned (and continue to ban) Donald Trump, one of the most notorious Twitter users of all time (who singlehandedly kept CNN in business).

>This week I reported someone on Twitter for telling me to kill myself ("Kill yourself" was their exact words). Twitter said they found this "Doesn't violate our rules".

Sounds reasonable, no? Just saying "Kill yourself", which is a colloquialism for "f@uck off" or "get bent", shouldn't result in a banning in my opinion. If, in fact, the person was trying to convince you to do so, that's evil, and is a totally different story.

Companies aren't consistent internally. At least Twitch had a list of 'do not ban' users leaked, and they also banned some high earners while defending others. Rationality is not a given.

Applying different standards to different folks seems perfectly rational to me.

> which is a colloquialism for "f@uck off" or "get bent"

It's not; fuck off tells someone to go away, get bent means they want to have sex with you; kill yourself is... self explanatory.

To be fair, “fuck you” is a bit rapey— but the phrase is obviously acceptable in degree.

In contrast, “I hope someone rapes you” is generally considered over the line.

“Go jump off a bridge” is ok to say in person, but not online. Go figure!

There is a morality to it all. Still trying to figure it out.

> Sounds reasonable, no? Just saying "Kill yourself", which is a colloquialism for "f@uck off" or "get bent", shouldn't result in a banning in my opinion.

That's where we are on social media. Making the good faith argument that telling someone to kill themselves is not harassment or death threat.. just a normal thing to tell each other.

Free speech absolutism is absolutely bonkers

It’s not normal or healthy, but said once by an individual in isolation, it’s also clearly not harassment or a death threat.

What’s bonkers is this genuinely childish trend of lobbying authority figures to limit what others are allowed to say or hear, and who is allowed to speak, instead of just blocking and moving on.

It is extremely difficult to get people banned from Twitter even for repeated harrasment and clear hate speech. There are also lots of reports of people getting banned for trivial things. Two possibilities are widely believed:

- mass-reporting works even if somebody is innocent, if you get enough reports

- poor quality control: decisions are made by single individuals, and mistakes or even just a misclick may result in a ban. Remember that these people are working 8+ hour days just clicking on offensive tweets the system shows them.

Which is what every single company would say when caught red-handed.

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