> And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now.
I highly doubt it.
I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.
That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.
That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…
Yep. I've got a small number of friends who are regularly harassed on Twitter (and elsewhere). One for their professional work on climate change. One for their professional work on racial history. And one for their transgender status while being professionally associated with a field that attracts an unusual number of alt-right people.
There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.
Well but that would be great, I'm too young to have been part of that magical usenet era that people talk about with such reverence, and these days I have no idea how to get on there, if there's anyone on there I might care about, or whether it even still exists. So a new usenet with extra steps (and, uh, accessible through the http protocol) sounds great to me.
USENET never really solved spam. I remember the statistic that at one point one third of usenet traffic was spam and another third was spam cancels. Here's what people felt at the time: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:
> Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that
Social media keep using this excuse for not trying. We can moderate spam in emails with a simple naive bayes classifier, why don't we just do that with comments? It could easily classify comments that are part of a bandwagon and flag them automaticly hiding them or for human review.
We are able to moderate email but the concepts we use to do so are never applied to comments, I don't know why, this seems like a solved problem.
If you're trying to use the SPAM model as some kind of example of success I believe you may have already failed.
In SMTP servers I've managed for clients we typically block anywhere from 80 to 99.999% (yes 10000 blocked to one success) messages. I'd call that MegaModeration if there was such a term.
And if you think email spam is solved then I don't believe you read HN often as there is a common complaint of "Gmail is blocking anything I send, I'm a low volume non-commercial sender"
In addition email filtering is extremely slow to react to new methods, generally taking hours depending on the reporting system.
Lastly, you've not thought about the problem much. How are you going to rapidly detect the difference between a fun meme that spreads virally versus an attack against an individual. Far more often you're going to be blocking something that's not a bad thing.
Fair concerns but I have trained a Naive bayes classifier on twitter data in the past using [1] a social study of categorised tweet to train the classifier and got around 85% accuracy. It was able to detect and properly classify rape threats as abusive but conversations about rape seed oil as non abusive. Considering the small data set and how little entropy there is between samples I consider it pretty useful.
I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.
I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.
Training classifiers can also go off the rails under adversarial attack. This commonly showed up in our systems when people sent short emails that were more ambiguous. For example this tends to cause problems where malevolent users adopt dogwhistles co-opting the language of the attacked group. The attacked group commonly becomes the ones getting banned/blocked in these cases
Okay, I actually did laugh out loud a little at the ‘we are able to moderate email’, bit.
Spam filters are probably one of the single most consistently unreliable pieces of software I ever have to use; regardless of the email provider; or email client I use.
I have to check my junk folder like it’s my inbox.
On both Apple Mail and Outlook; with two different emails - email money transfers (EMTs) will get shoved in my junk box; despite the dozens of times I have marked said emails as not junk.
I’ll get spam emails, but I don’t get mail from newsletters I’ve actually signed up for.
Like…if you’re trying to use spam emails as an example of success; and even a model we should follow for…anything else; I’m going to laugh you out of the room and tell you to keep me the hell away from whatever tools you want to use with that technology.
Spam filtering software for email is at best useless; at its worst; mind numbing log frustrating. It’s a tool I’ll never trust.
That's the current system. ML plus humans to remove harmful content. And people like Elon are extremely upset about this. Heck, you even see the GOP complaining about spam filtering on gmail. Hard to say that this is a solved problem that everybody agrees works well.
A somewhat flawed solution to a harassment campaign is whitelists.
This is also the approach celebrities in general need to take as they get drowned in messages (elon musk could spend 24/7 reading messages sent to him and read only a tiny fraction), so harassment can probably be solved by whatever solution we come up with for celebs.
Can make some fairly elaborate "allow" rules depending on why you might want to read messages from non-contacts like "this person is a contact of a contact" or "this person has "IT" in their Twitter bio or "this person is on the 'good person' white list that Mr. Whitelist maintains for the community".
I highly doubt it.
I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.
That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.
That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…