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Twitter Social Networks

Twitter Says It's Better at Spotting Abusive Tweets Than Users (engadget.com) 46

Twitter says it has achieved a major milestone in its attempts to improve the "health" of its platform. From a report: According to the company's most recent earnings report, 50 percent of abusive tweets removed this past quarter were pulled before a user even flagged the content. That's up from 38 percent in Q1. Twitter adds that it achieved the milestone on the back of improvements it made to its machine learning-based moderation algorithms, which in turn forward more tweets to the company's employees to scrutinize.
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Twitter Says It's Better at Spotting Abusive Tweets Than Users

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  • by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Thursday October 24, 2019 @01:29PM (#59343102)

    In Twitter's case calls for violence, racism, sexism, doxxing, and antisemitism are all perfectly fine as long as it's their bluechecks doing it. The milestone here is that they've finally gotten their algorithm tweaked so that it censors people based on their political alignment rather than the content of their tweets.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      In Twitter's case calls for violence, racism, sexism, doxxing, and antisemitism are all perfectly fine as long as it's their bluechecks doing it. The milestone here is that they've finally gotten their algorithm tweaked so that it censors people based on their political alignment rather than the content of their tweets.

      It would really help your case if you could post a few links to tweets you've reported.

      • It would really help your case if you could post a few links to tweets you've reported

        I second this. The level of talk on this very topic would indicate that there has to be mountains of evidence, like an overwhelming amount of evidence. However, every time it is brought up that evidence is sorely lacking. I am not one to say it isn't happening but I'm definitely on the skeptical fence here for the dry well of evidence that's been offered thus far.

        I can totally believe it as algorithms follow popular trends and if the vast amount of users on Twitter are left leaning, then the algorithm is

  • by anarcobra ( 1551067 ) on Thursday October 24, 2019 @01:29PM (#59343104)
    By this metric they would have 100% success rate by simply deleting all tweets.
    Not that I would mind.
    • In the meantime, my email provider is filtering 95% of all spam without needing my intervention.

      Congratulations Twitter on achieving that 50%

  • That's up from 38 percent in Q1

    What is the quota for Q3?

  • Twitter found people are abused when the people themselves don't realize they were being abused!!! Someone should inform those people quick. Surely there are some lawyers and AI that would be willing to help us all sue one another!
  • by geek ( 5680 ) on Thursday October 24, 2019 @01:43PM (#59343172)

    I'm truly amazed people still use Twitter. I remember when it started thinking "140 characters? Why bother" and have never had an account on it. Now it's 140 characters + censorship left and right. What's the point of this thing?

    It seems self feeding at this point. I never hear anyone talk about what's on Twitter. I hear plenty about Facebook or Reddit and random other places but I have never once had anyone talk to me about Twitter trends. It seems like they only talk about Twitter on Twitter.

    The last few years it's spread into news articles. Like Twitter has replaced journalism. I got to supposed news sites and half the fucking articles are links to Twitter posts from random dbag A and random dbag B. Like is this supposed to be news? Just seems like outrage culture to me.

    • I have a twitter account, but for the life of me. I can not remember ever making a tweet. Not even retweeting. I am sure I did, but danged if I know when or what. Hell, I am not even sure I remember my password for it. Lol, no lie.
    • by novakyu ( 636495 )

      Now it's 140 characters + censorship left and right. What's the point of this thing?

      Wow, you need to keep up. Now it's 280 characters + censorship left and right. The extra 140 characters make up for all the beatings.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      People use it because most of them never get censored and it allows them to be much closer to interesting people than ever before. For example you can follow a bunch of politicians and get their unfiltered thoughts on events, where as on the news you might only get a soundbite from one of them. You can also respond and sometimes they respond back - I've had conversations with people in power, in Parliament and the Lords, and it's been productive.

    • I'm truly amazed people still use Twitter. I remember when it started thinking "140 characters? Why bother" and have never had an account on it. Now it's 140 characters + censorship left and right. What's the point of this thing?

      It seems self feeding at this point. I never hear anyone talk about what's on Twitter. I hear plenty about Facebook or Reddit and random other places but I have never once had anyone talk to me about Twitter trends. It seems like they only talk about Twitter on Twitter.

      The last few years it's spread into news articles. Like Twitter has replaced journalism. I got to supposed news sites and half the fucking articles are links to Twitter posts from random dbag A and random dbag B. Like is this supposed to be news? Just seems like outrage culture to me.

      Exactly. Who cares what people say on some stupid, deliberately crippled blog? That's all Twitter is. When did the world go insane?

  • ... the interest of users in reporting abuse.

  • The snowflake demographic (generally with pronouns in their bio) tend to class almost anything as abuse, generally the words "no" or "I disagree" or "you're wrong"is classed as abuse, up to and including "you're wrong, here's the data" etc.

    With us or against us, hell of a way to live.

  • How does that work?

    If they are pulled, then how can they be seen to be flagged?

    Do^H^HLie better, @Jack.

  • Results in getting good at political censorship.
    A "milestone" in more censorship for a nation with freedom of speech... freedom of the press.
  • So, Twitter knew that the offended party would be offended, removed the tweet, and saved the party from seeing the tweet and being offended. And it checked that it was right by...?

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

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