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Twitter Will Start Hiding Tweets That 'Detract From the Conversation' (slate.com)
Yesterday, Twitter announced several new changes to quiet trolls and remove spam. According to Slate, the company "will begin hiding tweets from certain accounts in conversations and search results." In order to see them, you'll now have to scroll to the bottom of the conversation and click "Show more replies," or go into your search settings and choose "See everything." From the report: When Twitter's software decides that a certain user is "detract[ing] from the conversation," all of that user's tweets will be hidden from search results and public conversations until their reputation improves. And they won't know that they're being muted in this way; Twitter says it's still working on ways to notify people and help them get back into its good graces. In the meantime, their tweets will still be visible to their followers as usual and will still be able to be retweeted by others. They just won't show up in conversational threads or search results by default. The change will affect a very small fraction of users, explained Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, Del Harvey -- much less than 1 percent. Still, the company believes it could make a significant difference in the average user's experience. In early testing of the new feature, Twitter said it has seen a 4 percent drop in abuse reports in its search tool and an 8 percent drop in abuse reports in conversation threads.
Twitters new group think reinforcement feature!
Let's start by banning the posts about Trump and his sons going to prison. Get rid of the leftist spam.
Twitter will be censoring certain users and accounts from appearing prominently in any feeds, unless explicitly searched for.
Which is fine, I'm all for stepping on the trolls, but then I remembered, censorship is bad, even in this situation. Who decides what gets published and what gets buried? That's what bothers me.
If it's an algorithm, then I gotta ask, who wrote the algorithm? Explain it to us, in all the gritty details, because otherwise, it's just censorship based on some unknown criteria. Censorship is bad enough, but censorship without an obvious target? Scary.
O yea, this won't be abused at all. Everything starts off as some wacky form of good intentions. Soon after, someone with no so decent intentions gets their mitts on the controls and then people start wondering how it all happened.
Oh well, score 1 for the echo chamber at least!
Twitters new group think reinforcement feature!
Seriously. Silcon valley liberals think silencing non-politicallycorrect non-leftist posts will help their side? They will just reinforce their leftist bubble of estrangement from the rest of the country and this will possibly lead to even greater election defeats.
Prior to the 2016 election I had some arguments with friends in that bubble. Trying to explain to them that the "blue wall" of the industrial states was nonsense. That many blue collar "democrats" are moderate non-ideologues who are not necessary loyal to the party, they have a certain independence. All things being equal a democratic candidate may have an advantage but if a republican candidate can deliver a "better" message to them they will consider voting for the republican candidate. Ex: the "Reagan Democrats". But no, to the silicon valley types the blue wall was impenetrable, no one could ever vote for a republican, no one could ever let economic fears and concerns be their deciding factor. And on election day they learned how wrong they were.
This twitter feature will just silence those outside the bubble, and those inside the bubble will hear fewer "warnings" from outside and have an even deeper sense of false security in the future.
By operating at a lower threshold for offense-taking than your opponents, and reporting them at a greater rate than they do you, you can leverage the apparent functional criteria of Twitter's "anti-troll" algorithm to your own ends. The race to maximum fragility has begun. Shed your tears freely and rest not those report buttons, as they are ammunition in the war for visibility.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
What is trolling, and not. Everyone's perspectives can differ, so... Will anyone really notice less trolling after it's implementation? We'll see.
Confronting a leftist with an "uncomfortable" truth is trolling. Seen it many times, the accusation is a defensive reaction to dismiss the "uncomfortable" thoughts, to avoid having to respond on the merits.
How Internet Fighting Works courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
When Instapundit was suspended for tweeting that if your car is surrounded by "protesters" on a highway you need to get out of there even if it means running some of them down. Meanwhile, on the "black" side of Twitter, you can post all sorts of threatening things because you're part of the "oppressed class" and according to progressive lore, racism is only possible if you have power (which only whites and honorary whites like certain types of Asians have).
So by "detracting from the conversation" I think he means things like posting hatefacts back at whiny activists and celebrities who think it's 1930s and they're the courageous anti-Fascist opposition when the only organized and regimented organizations using violence to stifle politics are on their side.