Elon Musk says Twitter is granting ‘amnesty’ to suspended accounts | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says Twitter is granting ‘amnesty’ to suspended accounts

cnbc.com

13 pointsmfiguiere9 comments

I'm happy Elon is doing this.

My previous Twitter account was banned and even though I asked Twitter support twice for the reason why my account was banned, never got an answer. I never learned what my offending tweet was.

But I lean towards the right, so I can only imagine some of my tweets ruffled against the opinions of some Twitter employees and hence those employees felt a need to ban me. Even though my account had few followers (<100 most likely).

I hope in the future when a person gets banned, they will at least will learn what tweet was against the ToS, so a person has a better ability to appeal.

Does anyone have any ideas why companies like Facebook or Twitter would prefer not to mention the post of tweet that was against the ToS? Could there be some legal reason?

My guess would be be that giving a specific reason or tweet would aid bot developers in learning how to evade boot-detection algos.

And yet we have no problem saying what laws a person has broken. They don't need to give details of the investigation but without having something they can unambiguously point to, "this is against our policies" they lose legitimacy and open themselves up to accusations of bias such as what we're discussing now.

While cases like yours are indeed a problem with automated moderation (and a very bad experience), I feel that this is an extremely poor move considering all the research on the effect of disinformation campaigns on society and election results.

Complains by Elon himself on the percentage of non-legitimate accounts were dire - it was not long ago that it was said to be bad enough for him to want out of buying the company.

I’d say in the balance between a few users annoyed at a false positive and holding democracy together, one should safely side on pushing for the second.

Particularly in a service like twitter, where the pain caused by a single account being banned is negligible- it’s not like being banned from google where you might lose life memories and essential access to information.

The populi will vox on a larger scale, and over a longer timeframe, than one man's hasty, insular poll can show.

That is, Twitter's success or failure over the next year or two will be the ultimate proof of leadership wisdom, or lack thereof.

You don’t understand, tomorrow everyone is going to move to Mastodon and Elon Musk will have to declare bankruptcy.

Alternatively, humanity could just bore of the entire notion that the internet needs a single, centrally-controlled virtual town square for short-form text broadcasting.

I don’t think the incentive structure will lead to that outcome.

Perhaps not, but social and competitive structures may.

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