All of that is irrelevant. Twitter had a secret blacklist. Gross behavior from a gross company.
I am glad that you agree that this is such a huge problem, and it is a good thing that now more people are away of how extensive it is.
Try working in integrity for a few years, you'll realise why these things are necessary, because people just won't stop being jerks.
So my point stands.
>“It’s shaping up to be one of the highest-impact things that we’ve done,” the chief executive, Jack Dorsey ,said of the update, which will change how tweets appear in search results or conversations. “The spirit of the thing is that we want to take the burden off the person receiving abuse or mob-like behavior.”
> The new system will use behavioral signals to assess whether a Twitter account is adding to – or detracting from – the tenor of conversations...
> The updated algorithm will result in certain tweets being pushed further down in a list of search results or replies, but will not delete them from the platform.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/15/twitter-r...
These screenshots are about actions taken by Twitter employees, not an updated algorithm.
It's hard to make people care about this stuff. Most of us only start to see the harm of something when it's shown in context. Just showing that something can be theoretically harmful isn't enough.
The question is not what is getting demoted, it's how. In this case, it's being done secretly, and Twitter isn't the only one doing it:
It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...
More than 95% of the time I see a flagged account on HN, they post complete garbage that leads to more flaming replies if not removed promptly. HN has a very limited set of moderators, like one or two, who cannot police every comment 24/7.
>Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.
Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
Shadow moderation was implemented without doing any research. I agree it's about time more studies are done on all types of content and all platforms in order to assess whether or not this functionality furthers the platforms' goals.
> Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken
Good call. Blog post summarizing [1] and pdf [2]
> Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
All of them that don't use the ShadowBan add-on, I guess.
Indeed shadow moderation appears to have made platforms more popular. I won't disagree there. But I also think it's clear it has contributed to echo chambers and increased isolation and tribality.
I think we're reaching a point where the public wants to know what's going on in social media. Its harmful nature is not just driven by preference-driven news feeds, which we already know can be toxic, it's also driven by shadow moderation. That's the other shoe that may be dropping here.
[1] https://medium.com/acm-cscw/does-transparency-in-moderation-...
[2] https://shagunjhaver.com/research/articles/jhaver-2019-trans...
You could have just use the menu to find it, it only took a few seconds. There's a preprint available there if you need it. https://shagunjhaver.com/research/
I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (especially when almost all of them have a backup account).
And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?