Bill Browder: Just did a little Twitter experiment. After posting a tweet I got a reply from...

[demmiblue]

Just did a little Twitter experiment. After posting a tweet I got a reply from a Russian troll saying “Next I coming over to kikinn Ur Jude Ass” so I thought I would report it to Twitter and see what happens. Two minutes later I get a response from Twitter saying “No violation”

Link to tweet

UPDATE: the account has been suspended.

[ck4829]

1. Wow...

[lark]

2. I signed up for Twitter because I wanted to reply to one I saw here.

Since then I have never gone back on and think I'll just let that one lie fallow for awhile.

[Zoonart]

3. Seriously...frack all these social media sites.

They have been weaponized to divide us and program us to us shop. They steal our information and weaponize our language and thought patterns.
If it is not the bots it's the advertising and subversion of our news choices.

[violetpastille]

26. +1

[mitch96]

4. I think the trolls are trying to beat the algorithm..

Once they get that they are in.. Humans can decipher info that does not make sense to a algorithm..
Hugh knaw vat ay means?
m

[onlyadream]

5. Exactly.

The search engine looks for certain words and the Russian trolls are sneaky.

[dlk]

6. One More Reason Why Twitter Should Be Regulated

Twitter is unable to adequately regulate itself. Seriously, how silly and naive is it to expect large media companies to adequately and fairly self/regulate? They will never do it.

[MineralMan]

19. Regulated by whom?

The government? Which government?

Actually, those companies are working very hard to self-regulate. How many millions of tweets are posted daily, do you suppose?

Algorithms are used as the first step of screening reported tweets. Human readers are used as a second step when multiple complaints are filed. Humans can actually understand language and spot spelling changes that defeat the algorithms. That's why the offending account was suspended, once it went to human review.

Twitter and other companies do not want threatening tweets to remain visible. It's bad for business. But, spotting them and dealing with them isn't all that simple, really.

How do you propose handling this in any other way?

[grantcart]

28. How about civil liability?

Make them post a 100 million bond and every time they don't adjudicate a complaint correctly in accordance to their rules it triggers arbitration with a minimum $ 10,000 fine if they ate found in non compliance with their own terms of service

[MineralMan]

29. Access to the Federal Court System exists.

File a class action civil suit. Otherwise, how would such a thing be done?

Who would impose that bond? And on what would such a thing be based?

There are many ideas. Putting them into action is another matter, isn't it?

[grantcart]

31. Arbitration is much faster and cheaper and is used by most companies

In their service agreements against the consumer, so what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Class action lawsuit suits would not be practical because you would have to show financial harm which isn't the issue here.

The issue here is creating liability for a social media platform that doesn't follow their own terms of service.

Remember these aren't"free" services, they are getting people to offer up a valuable asset (their personal data) which they then sell in the market place. When they get people to participate and give up personal information they promise in exchange to follow a clearly stated terms of service. If they violate the terms of service they have broken the contract and should be held liable.

[MineralMan]

32. Well, I'm sure there are attorneys who understand how to proceed.

Maybe you could contact one such attorney. I fail to see any mechanism for forcing such a thing on Twitter or any of the other social media venues.

Since using them is purely a voluntary thing, it's easy enough to avoid all of that, right?

I use them all, one way or another. I'm somehow not feeling all that put upon by them. I use them as I choose. When they serve my needs, I find them valuable to some degree. I'm not particularly inclined to take any action against them. Are you? If so, perhaps you should pursue avenues to do that.

[grantcart]

35. No the enforcement mechanism is an issue for Congress jyst as it would be

For any national commercial institution like interstate banking, for example.

These social media platforms are more powerful than all the newsprint media for example and a falsely reported story can have dramatic and devistating implicatios including pushing one side in an election, causing irreversible harm to a business or causing a bullied gay student to commit suicide, among some of the things we know has happened.

As to your other point that Russian bots have made it difficult for Twitter, Facebook and others response bots to enforce their rules: That is not relevant, companies that cannot enforce their terms of service should face crippling financial penalties until they can, even if that means they have to go offline.

I guarantee you one thing; if faced with closure all of these sites will find the means to enforce their terms of service.

[MineralMan]

36. I doubt that Congress can pass any such laws.

I don't think they would stand up under a 1st Amendment challenge, frankly. Imposing some sort of bond and penalties isn't really the sort of thing Congress does to media groups.

Besides, it would be child's play to relocate a social media company offshore. Then, what authority would Congress have?

The Internet is Pandora's Box. That's the simplest way to look at it. Once it was opened, everything good and bad about it escaped from that box and is running free around the globe.

That's good and bad at the same time. On the good side, everyone is now his or her own publisher, and everyone is a potential viewer or reader. On the bad side are bad people doing bad things. What are bad things? Well, that depends on whom you ask. For example, I'm an atheist, and I question religious belief quite openly. I can do that freely on the Internet, but many would dearly love to keep me and others from doing so. They consider such behavior to be bad. That group outnumbers the odd atheists who publicly question religious belief. Who should decide what's OK and what's not?

The Internet is global. It can't be otherwise any longer. The Internet is universally available, or very close to that. It's pretty clear that it is long past being regulated. It actively resists being regulated. In many ways, it has become the machine intelligence everyone is so worried about. It is a means for the entire hive of humanity to communicate within itself.

What is the answer? Individual initiative to control what gets through to the individual. When a Russian bot follows my Twitter feed, I block that bot as soon as I detect it. Problem solved, for me at least. If a feed I follow gets taken over by bots, I simply unfollow that feed. Easy.

On Facebook, my own feed is invisible unless you are a friend. If you are a friend and you offend, you get blocked or unfriended. I control my own Facebook feed. Ads appear, but I never look at them. My brain ignores that part of the screen out of habit. If annoying things appear as sponsored posts, I hide them. I have fairly effective control of my own experience.

I do not have any control over your Internet experience, nor do I want any. I'm sure you don't want my control exerted, either.

The Internet just IS. I can't control it. Nobody can, really. So, I control my window into it. I can do that.

[MineralMan]

7. Which account has been suspended?

Yours or the threatener's?

If it was the account that sent the threat, then that's good news, despite the response you got from Twitter. That response was probably automatically generated, based on a word search comparison, looking for threatening language. The suspension came after a human looked at the offending tweet.

Such misspellings are a common way to avoid automated evaluations. Email spammers use that technique all the time. It works, until a human looks at the traffic.

[safeinOhio]

8. Dang I should join as I use alternative spelling.

One of my favorite professors told me that. I loved her.

[Wounded Bear]

10. Yeah, I get lots of spam with 'alternative spelling'...

They also use numbers as letters and odd fonts to try and fool the algorithm. Most of them go straight to spam for me.

[MineralMan]

16. Yes. Spam filter algorithms have gotten pretty good.

Twitter has a more difficult problem, since tweets are made in many languages. Language algorithms that look through text for threatening language are very difficult to create. Spelling words differently can throw them off. That's why there are also human reviewers. That process takes longer and can't be automated.

For example, the word "Jude" in the threat was passed over, because "Jude" is a word with other meanings. Algorithms don't understand language, so they can't detect which meaning was intended.

Once a human reviewer saw the threatening post, the account was suspended. Things worked.

[frogmarch]

11. The threatener's account was suspended

Bill Browder
‏
Verified account

@Billbrowder
37m37 minutes ago
More
Important update on my little Twitter experiment. After I tweeted out Twitter’s response that there was no violation for someone wanting to “Coming Over to Kikinnn my Jude Ass” and getting hundreds of retweets, Twitter has just reversed their decision and “suspended the account”

https://twitter.com/Billbrowder?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1067064108606984198&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.democraticun

[MineralMan]

14. Thanks. That's what I thought.

[Wounded Bear]

20. Yeah, looked like that first response was from a bot...

I guess it's OK that they don't auto-delete over agressively.

[MineralMan]

21. It's a delicate balance for Twitter.

I get that. What is really important is that Twitter users report tweets that should be deleted. Unless they do that, what is Twitter supposed to do?

And, quite naturally, the more reports of such tweets that come in, the more likely a human will review the tweet. I don't know what the threshold for the number of tweets is in Twitter's algorithm to send the tweet for human review. I don't think anyone not at Twitter knows that threshold.

[Achilleaze]

9. Twitter is totally abdicating responsibility to act responsibly

screw twitter

[uponit7771]

12. +1

[MineralMan]

13. No, it's not. Its automated review did not catch the threat

due to intentional spelling errors used in the threatening tweet. However, a human viewer at Twitter also reviewed the complaint, saw the thread and banned that account.

There is no way that automated, algorithm-based scans can catch everything. That's why there are human reviewers at Twitter and other social media outlets. Their review may not be immediate, though.

[More_Cowbell]

33. But from seeing other reports, I think that a human reviewed it only because of Browder's retweet

An ordinary user who was threatened, who doesn't have Browder's clout and reach, would never get the account closed. That user would be harassed forever.

eta: If it's Twitter's policy to have a bot respond immediately and then have a human review, then the bot response should say that.

[MineralMan]

34. I don't know what triggers a human review of a tweet.

No idea. I've reported a few tweets. Each time, it was removed. I routinely block followers who post nonsense or ugliness as comments to my tweets. They disappear from my view, which is the idea, and that account can't post comments any longer. I find that useful.

I'm sure there is some sort of threshold that triggers a human review. Maybe there are several different paths to that end. I don't know.

People post offensive crap everywhere. I know of no way to prevent that before the fact. Well, I do. By disabling all comments and replies, a social media venue could accomplish that, but then it wouldn't be social media any longer.

I don't know. I use the things as long as they are useful to me. I utilize each service's tools to do what I can to control my presence. If those aren't enough, I abandon the venue.

Here's an article that does a pretty good job of explaining the scope of the problem. Twitter's trying to find a solution. It's not an easy problem to solve:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/07/report-millions-of-tweets-spread-anti-semitic-messages/

[Pepsidog]

24. Hard to believe there hasn't been any viable alternative crop up to twitter or Facebook. Especially

Facebook. I know many republicans who have been severely brainwashed by Facebook postings that get forwarded and are nothing but lies and distortions. It’s incredible to see how easily people can be deceived into believing some of the most crazy things. I know it’s a thorny problem but something must be done.

[DFW]

15. Sounds more like North Dakota than Russia

Two friends of mine got a long threatening voicemail once calling them "Jim Heartburn and Poison Ivy." The FBI traced it to North Dakota, but went no further.

[PNW-Dem]

17. I hope this goes viral

[Pepsidog]

22. Needless to say, Dumpster's twitter has done more harm than any other twitter account.

[erronis]

30. Well, at least it lets the world see what a dump f*ck he is. Can't shut his trap.

[hibbing]

23. I use Twitter, but it's a cesspool n/t

[Hortensis]

25. GOOD for Browder, a true hero and big-time kick-ass activist.

Thanks for the update, Demmiblue. Not being Browder and already knowing, I was just about to go figure out how to express my part of the outrage he generated to Twitter.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

27. This happens to women and POC all the time and very little is done. A large following can help boost

the signal, but some voices are more equal than others when it comes to highlighting online abuse.