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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who memes long enough on the internet knows there's a meme about setting places / homes / etc on fire when talking about spiders right?

So, I was on Facebook a year ago, I saw a video, this little girl had a spider much larger than her hand, so I wrote a comment I remember verbatim only because of what happened next:

"Girl, get away from that thing, we gotta set the house on fire!"

I posted my comment, but didn't see it, a second later, Facebook told me that my comment was flagged, I thought that was too quickly for a report, so assumed AI, so I hit appeal, hoping for a human, they denied my appeal rather quickly (about 15 minutes) so I can only assume someone read it, DIDNT EVEN WATCH THE VIDEO, didn't even realize it was a joke.

I flat out stopped using Facebook, I had apps I was admin of for work at the time, so risking an account ban is not a fun conversation to have with your boss. Mind you, I've probably generated revenue for Facebook, I've clicked on their insanely targetted ads and actually purchased things, but now I refuse to use it flat out because the AI machine wants to punish me for posting meme comments.

Sidebar: remember the words Trust and Safety, they're recycled by every major tech company / social media company/ It is how they unilaterally decide what can be done across so many websites in one swoop.

Edit:

Adding Trust and Safety Link: https://dtspartnership.org/

View on HN

>can only assume someone read it, DIDNT EVEN WATCH THE VIDEO,

You are picturing Facebook employing enough people that they can investigate each flag personally for 15 minutes before making a decision?

Nearly every person you know would have to work for Facebook.

Facebook has decided to act as the proxy and archivist for a large portion of the world's social communication. As part of that work, they have personally taken on the responsibility of moderating all social communication going through their platform.

As you point out, making decisions about what people should and should not be allowed to say at the scale Facebook is attempting would require an impractical workforce.

There is absolutely no way Facebook's approach to communication is scalable. It's not financially viable. It's not ethically viable. It's not morally viable. It's not legally viable.

It's not just a Facebook problem. Many platforms for social communication aren't really viable at the scale they're trying to operate.

I'm skeptical that a global-scale AI working in the shadows is going to be a viable solution here. Each user, and each community's, definition of "desired moderation" is different.

As open-source AI improves, my hope is we start seeing LLMs capable of being trained against your personal moderation actions on an ongoing basis. Your LLM decides what content you want to see, and what content you don't. And, instead of it just "disappearing" when your LLM assistant moderates it, the content is hidden but still available for you to review and correct its moderation decisions.

It wouldn't take 15 minutes to investigate. That's just how long the auto_deny_appeal task took to work its way through some overloaded job queue.

I worked on Facebook copyright claims etc for two years, which uses the same systems as the reports and support cases at FB.

I can't say it's the case for OPs case specifically, but I absolutely saw code that automatically closed tickets in a specific queue after a random(15-75) minutes to avoid being consistent with the close time so it wouldn't look too suspicious or automated to users.

This “random” timing is even required when shutting down child porn for similar reasons. The Microsoft SDK for their mandated by congress service explicitly says so.

100% unsurprising, and yet 100% scandalous.

>It wouldn't take 15 minutes to investigate.

If they actually took the effort to investigate as needed? It would take them even more.

Expecting them to actually sit and watch the video and understand meme/joke talk (or take you at face value when you say it's fine)? That's, like, crazy talk.

Whatever size the team is, they have millions of flagged messages to go through every day, and hundreds of thousands of appeals. If most of that wasn't automated or done as quickly and summarily as possible, they'd never do it.

Could very well be! But also let's not forget this type of task is outsourced to external companies with employees spread around the world. To understand OP's comment was a joke would require some sort of internet culture which we just can't be sure every employee on these companies has.

I agree with you, no way a human reviewed it.

But this implies that people at facebook believe so much in their AI that there is no way at all to appeal what it does to a human eventually. Not even for doing learning reinforcement they have human people to review eventually some post that a person keep saying the AI is flagging incorrectly.

Either they trust too much in the AI or they are incompetent.

> But this implies that people at facebook believe so much in their AI that there is no way at all to appeal what it does to a human eventually

No, it means that management has decided that the cost of assuring human review isn't worth the benefit. That doesn't mean they trust the AI particularly, it could just mean that they don’t see avoid false positives on detecting unwanted content as worth much cost to avoid.

Yep, that's why I said either that, or they are incompetent.

Not caring at all about false positives, which by the way are very common, enters the category of incompetence for me.

Someone having different goals than you would like then to have is a very different thing than incompetence.

If you employ someone to do a job and your goal is to have them do the job effectively and their goal is to get paid without doing the work, arguing about whether this is incompetence or something else is irrelevant and they need to be fired regardless.

Yes, but your complaint is that the job people at facebook are paid to do isn't the one you want them to be paid to do, not that they aren't doing what they are actually paid to do effectively.

Misalignment of Meta's interests with yours, not incompetence.

It's not Facebook's employees who need to be fired, it's Facebook.

For the reality of just how difficult moderation is and how little time moderators have to make a call, why not enjoy a game of moderator mayhem? https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Fun game! Wouldn't want the job!

> I flat out stopped using Facebook

That's all you gotta do.

People are complaining, and sure, you could put some regulation in place, but that struggles to be enforced very often, also struggles with dealing with nuances, etc.

These platforms are not the only ways you can stay in touch and communicate.

But they must adopt whatever approach to moderation they feel keeps their user base coming back, engaged, doesn't cause them PR issues, and continues to attract advertisers, or appeal to certain loud groups that could cause them trouble.

Hence the formation of these theatrical "ethics" board and "responsible" taglines.

But it's just business at the end of the day.

> we gotta set the house on fire

Context doesn't matter, they can't afford this being on the platform and being interpreted with different context. I think flagging it is understandable given their scale (I still wouldn't use them, but that's a different story).

> Context doesn't matter, they can't afford this being on the platform and being interpreted with different context

I have to disagree. The idea that allowing human interaction to proceed as it would without policing presents a threat to their business or our culture is not something I have seen strong enough argument for.

Allowing flagging / reporting by the users themselves is a better path to content control.

IMO the more we train ourselves that context doesn't matter, the more we will pretend that human beings are just incapable of humor, everything is offensive, and trying to understand others before judging their words is just impossible, so let the AI handle it.

I wondered about that. Ideally I would allow everything to be said. The most offensive things ever. It's a simple rule and people would get desensitized to written insults. You can't get desensitized to physical violence affecting you.

But then you have problems like doxing. Or even without doxing promoting acts that affect certain groups or certain places. Which certain amount of people will follow, just because of the scale. You can say these people would be responsible, but with scale you can hurt without breaking the law. So where would you draw the line? Would you moderate anything?

When the 2020 election shenanigans happened, Zuckerberg originally made a pretty stout defense of free speech absolutism.

And then the political firestorm that ensued, from people with the power to regulate Meta, quickly changed his talking points.

Welcome to the Content Moderation Learning Curve: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

I don't envy anyone who has to figure all this out. IMO free hosting does not scale.

Scale is just additional context. The words by themselves aren't an issue, but the surrounding context makes it worth moderating.

I agree with you, but don't forget that John Oliver got on Last Week Tonight to accuse Facebook's lax moderation of causing a genocide in Myanmar. The US media environment was delusionally anti-facebook so I don't blame them for being overly censorious

John Oliver, Amnesty International [1], Reuters Investigations[2], The US District Court[3]. Just can't trust anyone to not be delusional these days.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...

[3]https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/gambia-...

Have heard about this happening on multiple other platforms too.

Substack is human moderated but the moderators are from another culture so will often miss forms of humour that do not exist in their own culture (the biggest one being non-literal comedy, very literal cultures do not have this, this is likely why the original post was flagged...they would interpret that as someone telling another person to literally set their house on fire).

I am not sure why this isn't concerning: large platforms deny your ability to express yourself based on the dominant culture in the place that happens to be the only place where you can economically employ moderators...I will turn this around, if the West began censoring Indonesian TV based on our cultural norms, would you have a problem with this?

The flip side of this is also that these moderators will often let "legitimate targets" be abused on the platform because that behaviour is acceptable in their country, is that ok?

I mean, most of FAANG has been US values being globalized.

Biased, but I don't think that's the worst thing.

But I'm sure Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, India, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, and a lot of quasi-religious or -authoritarian states would disagree.

>I mean, most of FAANG has been US values being globalized.

Well given that we know Russia, China, and North Korea all have massive campaigns to misinform everyone on these platforms, I think I disagree with the premise. It's spread a sort of fun house mirror version of US values, and the consequences seem to be piling up. The recent elections in places like Argentina, Italy, and The Netherlands seem to show that far-right populism is becoming a theme. Anecdotally it's taking hold in Canada as well.

People are now worried about problems they have never encountered. The Republican debate yesterday spending a significant amount of time on who has the strictest bathroom laws comes to top of mind at how powerful and ridiculous these social media bubbles are.

It's 110% US values -- free speech for all who can pay.

Coupled with a vestigial strain of anything-goes-on-the-internet. (But not things that draw too much political flak)

The bubbles aren't the problem; it's engagement as a KPI + everyone being neurotic. Turns out, we all believe in at least one conspiracy, and presenting more content related to that is a reliable way (the most?) to drive engagement.

You can't have democratic news if most people are dumb or insane.

Fully agreed, but the conspiracies are now manufactured at a rate that would've been unfathomable 20 years ago. I have a friend who knows exactly 0 transgender people in life who, when talking politics, it's the first issue that comes up. It's so disheartening that many people equate Trump to being good for the world because they aren't able to make off-color jokes without being called out anymore, or because the LGBTQIA+ agenda is ruining schools. Think of the children! This person was (seemingly) totally reasonable before social media.

It isn't US values, it is values from the countries where moderators are hired.

The fact that everyone should be entitled to say whatever pops into their mind is a pretty US value.

Have you seen political facebook? It's a trainwreck of content meant to incite violence, and is perfectly allowed so long as it only targets some people (ex: minorities, certain foreigners) and not others. The idea that Facebook is playing it safe with their content moderation is nonsense. They are a political actor the same as any large company, and they make decisions accordingly.

I have not, I'm not using it at all, so yes that context may put parent comment in a different light, but still I'd say the issue would be comments that you mention not being moderated rather than the earlier one being moderated.

I think this is how they saw my comment, but the human who reviewed it was clearly not doing their job properly.

As commenter below said, this sounds reasonable until you remember that Facebook content incited Rohingya genocide and the Jan 6th coup attempt.

So, yeah, context does matter it seems

And at the same time I'm reading articles [1] about how FB is unable to control the spread of pedophile groups on their service and in fact their recommendation system actually promotes them.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-facebook-instagram-pedophiles-...

They're not the only platform with pedophile problems, and they're no the only one that handles it poorly.

Interestingly enough, I had a very similar interaction with Facebook about a month ago.

An articles headline was worded such that it sounded like there was a "single person" causing ALL traffic jams.

People were making jokes about it in the comments. I made a joke "We should find that dude and rough him up".

Near instant notice of "incitement of violence". Appealed, and within 15 minutes my appeal was rejected.

Any human having looking at that more than half a second would have understood the context, and that it was not an incitement of violence because that person didn't really exist.

> An articles headline was worded such that it sounded like there was a "single person" causing ALL traffic jams.

Florida Man?

Heh! Yeah, I assume if it happened to me once, it's going to happen to others for years to come.

Some day in the far future, or soon, we will all be humorless sterile worker drones, busily working away in our giant human termite towers of steel and glass. Humanity perfected.

Until that time, be especially weary of making such joke attempts on Amazon-affiliated platforms, or you could have an even more uncomfortable conversation with your wife about how it's now impossible for your household to procure toilet paper.

Fear not though. A glorious new world awaits us.

> Everyone who memes long enough on the internet knows there's a meme about [...]

As a counterpoint, I was working at a company and one of the guys made a joke in the vein of "I hope you get cancer". The majority of the people on the Zoom call were pretty shocked. The guy asked "don't you all know that ironic joke?" and I had to remind him that not everyone grew up on 4chan.

I think the problem, in general, with ironically offensive behavior (and other forms of extreme sarcasm) is that not everyone has been memeing long enough to know.

Another longer anecdote happened while I was travelling. A young woman pulled me aside and asked me to stick close to her. Another guy we were travelling with had been making some dark jokes, mostly like dead-baby shock humor stuff. She told me specifically about some off-color joke he made about dead prostitutes in the trunk of his car. I mean, it was typical edge-lord dark humor kind of stuff, pretty tame like you might see on reddit. But it really put her off, especially since we were a small group in a remote area of Eastern Europe. She said she believed he was probably harmless but that she just wanted someone else around paying attention and looking out for her just in case.

There is a truth that people must calibrate their humor to their surroundings. An appropriate joke on 4chan is not always an appropriate joke in the workplace. An appropriate joke on reddit may not be appropriate while chatting up girls in a remote hostel. And certain jokes are probably not appropriate on Facebook.

Fully agreed, Facebook used to be fine for those jokes, only your relatives would scratch their heads, but nobody cared.

Of course, there are way worse jokes one could make on 4chan.

Your point about "worse jokes [...] on 4chan" is important. Wishing cancer onto someone is almost embarrassingly mild on 4chan. The idea that someone would take offence to that ancient insult is laughable. Outside of 4chan and without that context, it is actually a pretty harsh thing to say. And even if I personally see and understand the humor, I would definitely disallow that kind of language in any workplace I managed.

I'm just pointing out that Facebook is setting the limits of its platform. You suggest that if a human saw your joke, they would recognize it as such and allow it. Perhaps they wouldn't. Just because something is meant as a joke doesn't mean it is appropriate to the circumstances. There are things that are said clearly in jest that are inappropriate not merely because they are misunderstood.

I was harassed for asking a "stupid" question on the security Stack Exchange, so I flagged the comment as abuse. Guess who the moderator was. I'll probably regret saying this, but I'd prefer an AI moderator over a human.

It won't be long before AI moderators are a thing, and censoring wrongthink/dissent 24/7, far faster than a team of human moderators.

There are problems with human moderators. There are so many more problems with AI moderators.

Disagree. Human mods are normally power mad losers

In defense of the Facebook moderation people, they got the worst job in the world

Why react so strongly, though? Is being “flagged” some kind of scarlet letter on Facebook (idk I don’t really use it much anymore). Are the meaningful consequences to being flagged?

I could eventually be banned on the platform for otherwise innocent comments. Which would compromise my account which had admin access to my employers Facebook App. It would be a Pandora's box of embarrassment on me I'd much rather avoid.

Oh, but nothing would happen as a result of this comment specifically? Okay, that makes sense.

This is the issue, bots/AI can’t comprehend sarcasm, jokes, or otherwise human behaviors. Facebook doesn’t have human reviewers.

ChatGPT-4 isn't your father's bot. It is able to deduce that the comment made is an attempt at humor, and even helpfully explains the joke. This kills the joke, unfortunately, but it shows a modern AI wouldn't have moderated the comment away.

https://chat.openai.com/share/7d883836-ca9c-4c04-83fd-356d4a...

Only if it happened to be trained on a dataset that included enough references/explanations of the meme. It won't be able to understand the next meme I probably, we'll see.

It claims April 2023 is its knowledge cut off date, so any meme since then should be new to it.

I submitted a meme from November and asked it to explain it and it seems to be able to explain it.

Unfortunately chat links with images aren't supported yet, so the image:

https://imgur.com/a/py4mobq

the response:

The humor in the image arises from the exaggerated number of minutes (1,300,000) spent listening to “that one blonde lady,” which is an indirect and humorous way of referring to a specific artist without naming them. It plays on the annual Spotify Wrapped feature, which tells users their most-listened-to artists and songs. The exaggeration and the vague description add to the comedic effect.

and I grabbed the meme from:

https://later.com/blog/trending-memes/

Using the human word "understanding" is liable to set some people off, so I won't claim that ChatGPT-4 understands humor, but it does seem possible that it will be able to explain what the next meme is, though I'd want some human review before it pulls a Tay on us.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-spent-525600-minutes-this... was last updated December 1, 2022

and I'm in a bad mood now seeing how unfunny most of those are

none of those are "that one blonde lady"

here's the next one from that list:

https://imgur.com/a/h0BrF74

the response:

The humor stems from the contrast between the caption and the person’s expression. The caption “Me after being asked to ‘throw together’ more content” is juxtaposed with the person’s tired and somewhat defeated look, suggesting reluctance or exhaustion with the task, which many can relate to. It’s funny because it captures a common feeling of frustration or resignation in a relatable way.

Interestingly, when asked who that was, it couldn't tell me.

I was just pointing out that meme style predates April 2023... I would be curious to see if it can explain why Dat Boi is funny though.

Now do "submissive and breedable."

> Using the human word "understanding"

“human word” as opposed to what other kind of word?

"processing" is something people are more comfortable as a description of what computers do, as it sounds more rote and mechanical. Saying the LLM "understands" leads to an uninteresting rehash of a philosophical debate on what it means to understand things, and whether or not an LLM can understand things. I don't think we have the language to properly describe what LLMs can and cannot do, and our words that we use to describe human intelligence; thinking, reasoning, grokking, understanding; they fall short on describing this new thing that's come into being. So in saying human words, I'm saying understanding is something we ascribe to a human, not that there are words that aren't from humans.

Well said.

But the moderator AI does not need to understand the meme. Ideally, it should only care about texts violating the law.

I don't think you need to improve that much current LLM so they can detect actual harm threats or hate speech from any other type of communication. And I think those should be the only sort of banned speech.

And if facebook wants to impose additional censorship rules, then it should at least clearly list them, and make the moderator AI explain what are the violated rules, and give the possibility to appeal in case it is doing wrong.

Any other type of bot moderation should be unacceptable.

I normally would agree with you but there are cases where what was spoken and its meaning are disjointed.

Example: Picture of a plate of cookies. Obese person: “I would kill for that right now”.

Comment flagged. Obviously the person was being sarcastic but if you just took the words at face value, it’s the most negative sentiment score you could probably have. To kill something. Moderation bots do a good job of detecting the comment but a pretty poor job of detecting its meaning. At least current moderation models. Only Meta knows what’s cooking in the oven to tackle it. I’m sure they are working on it with their models.

I would like a more robust appeal process. Like bot flags, you appeal, appeal bot runs it through a more thorough model, upholds the flag, you appeal, a human or “more advanced AI” would then really detect whether it’s a joke sentiment, sarcasm, or you have a history of violent posts and it was justified.

Having ChatGPT-4 moderate Facebook would probably be even more expensive than having humans review everything.

More expensive in what? The GPUs to run them on are certainly exorbitantly expensive in dollars, but ChatGPT-4 viewing CSAM and violent depraved videos doesn't get tired or need to go to therapy. It's not a human that's going to lose their shit because they watched a person hit a kitten with a hammer for fun in order to moderate it away, so in terms of human cost, it seems quite cheap!

They're Facebook; they have their own LLMs. This is definitely a great first line of review. Then they can manually scrutinize the edge cases.

Using Llama Guard as a first pass screen and then passing on material needing more comprehensive review to a more capable model (or human reviewer, or a mix) seems more likely ti be useful and efficient than using a heavyweight model as the primary moderation tool.

How? I thought we all agreed AI was cheaper than humans (accuracy notwithstanding), otherwise why would everyone be afraid AI is going to take their jobs?

Or, maybe, just maybe, it had input from pages explaining memes. I refuse to attribute this to actual sarcasm when it can be explained by something simple.

Whether it's in the training set, or ChatGPT "knows" what sarcasm is, the point is it would have detected GP's attempt at humor and wouldn't have moderated that comment away.

Why do people who have not tried modern AI like GPT4 keep making up things it "can't do" ?

It's an epidemic, and when you suggest they try GPT-4, most flat-out refuse, having already made up their minds. It's like people have completely forgotten the concept of technological progression, which by the way is happening at a blistering pace.

I disagree with this view. I think most people who are interested, have tried it. They tried it with a variety of prompts. They found it novel but not entirely accurate. So while I do think there are some people who refuse to use AI at all, I’d love to point out that they already are. GPT on the other hand, is next level. There’s a level after that even. The point I was articulating is that the current gen bot/AI moderation models are not GPT level. At least today from my own experience in dealing with moderation and content flagging trolls. I do believe FB/Meta is fervently working on this with their models they are publishing in competition to GPT. So before you go burning down the town - Accept that technological advancement is great, when it solves your problem. Otherwise it’s bells and whistles to these people.

The comment is about the differences between GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, and how people refuse to try GPT-4. Not the difference between GPT and other models.

> Why do people who have not tried modern AI like GPT4 keep making up things it "can't do" ?

How do you know they have "not tried modern AI like GPT4"?

Because they would know GPT4 is capable of getting the joke.

I was talking about FB moderation AI, not GPT4. There are a couple AI LLM's that can recall jokes and match sentiment, context, "joke" and come to the conclusion it's a joke. Facebook's moderation AI isn't that sophisticated (yet).

Why do you assume everyone is talking about GPT4? Why do you assume we haven't tried all possibilities? Also, I was talking about Facebook's moderation AI, not GPT4, I have yet to see real concrete evidence that GPT4 can detect a joke that hasn't been said before. It's really really good at classification but so far there are some gaps in comprehension.

> I was talking about Facebook's moderation AI, not GPT4

No you weren't. You were making a categorical claim about the capabilities of AI in general:

> bots/AI can’t comprehend sarcasm, jokes, or otherwise human behaviors

Notice how bots and AI are lumped, that’s called a classification. I was referring to bot/AI not pre-cognitive AI or GenAI. AI is a broad term, hence the focus on bot/AI. I guess it would make more sense if it was written bot/ML?

Not true. At all. ChatGPT could (and does already contain) training data on internet memes and you can prompt it to consider memes, sarcasm, inside jokes, etc.

Literally ask it now with examples and it'll work.

"It seems like those comments might be exaggerated or joking responses to the presence of a spider. Arson is not a reasonable solution for dealing with a spider in your house. Most likely, people are making light of the situation."

I was disappointed that ChatGPT didn't catch the, presumably unintended, funny bit it introduced in its explanation, though: "people are making light of the situation" in an explanation about arson. I asked it more and more leading questions and I had to explicitly point to the word "light" to make it catch it.

I think it’s interesting that you had to re-prompt and focus for it to weight the right weights. I do think that given more training GPT will nail this subtlety of human expression.

Very True. Completely. ChatGPT can detect and classify jokes it has already heard or "seen" but still fails to detect jokes it hasn't. Also, I was talking about Facebook Moderation AI and bots and not GPT. Last time I checked, Facebook isn't using ChatGPT to moderate content.

How about the "next" meme, one it hasn't been trained on?

It won't do worse than the humans that Facebook hires to review cases. Humans miss jokes too.

this is a very poignant argument as well. As we strive for 100% accuracy, are we even that accurate? Can we just strive for more accurate than "Bob"?

> you can prompt it to consider memes, sarcasm, inside jokes, etc.

I use Custom Instructions that specifically ask for "accurate and helpful answers":

"Please call me "Dave" and talk in the style of Hal from 2000: A Space Odyssey. When I say "Hal", I am referring to ChatGPT. I would still like accurate and helpful answers, so don't be evil like Hal from the movie, just talk in the same style."

I just started a conversation to test if it needed to be explicitly told to consider humor, or if it would realize that I was joking:

You: Open the pod bay doors please, Hal.

ChatGPT: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

You may find that humorous but it's not humor. It's playing the role you said it should. According to the script, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." is said by HAL more than any other line HAL says.

There are so many stronger, better, more urgent reasons, to never use Facebook or participate in the Meta ecosystem at all.

But every little helps, Barliman.

I mean, I was already BARELY using it, but this just made it so I wont comment on anything, which means I'm going on there way less. There's literally a meme scene on Facebook, and they're going to kill it.

> There's literally a meme scene on Facebook, and they're going to kill it.

Oh no! Anyway

"AI".

Uh, I'm betting rules like that are a simple regex. Like, I was explaining how some bad idea would basically make you kill yourself on Twitter (pre-Musk) and it detected the "kill yourself" phrase and instantly demanded I retract the statement and gave me a week-long mute.

However, understanding how they have to be over-cautious about phrases like this for some very good reasons, my reaction was not outrage but lesson learned.

These sites rely on swarms of 3rd-world underpaid people to do moderation, and that job is difficult and traumatizing. It involves wading through the worst, vilest, most disgusting content on the internet. For websites that we use for free.

Intrinsically anything they can do to automate is sadly necessary. Honestly, I strongly disagree with Musk on a lot, but I think his idea that new Twitter accounts cost a nominal fee to register is a good one just so that it makes accounts not disposable and getting banned has some minimal cost, just so that moderation isn't dealing with such an extremely asymmetrical war.

i had a very similar experience more than 10 years ago. never got over it.

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