Twitter “Silenced” Dissenting Voices During Protests in Egypt: Research

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/twitter-egypt-protests-accounts-suspended

by pulisse • 7 years ago

179 53 7 years ago

primroot• 7 years ago

Also relevant "Twitter’s ‘head of editorial’ for Middle East is officer in British Army’s information warfare unit" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-exec...

pjc50• 7 years ago

Sounds like the accounts got reported for abusive language. But since the process is opaque, there's no way to know.

ahbyb• 7 years ago

"abusive language" is such a generic term.

I was thinking that if I wanted every critic of mine to shut up I could say I identify as a female and then get them all banned for misgendering me if they ever referred to me as he/him :P

brenden2• 7 years ago

Algorithmic censorship has become the new norm. If you have opinions outside the Overton window you will be silently penalized on Twitter, FB, etc, and your posts will silently not appear. You have to go along with the tribe that you've been gerrymandered into or else you'll be silenced.

Content is dumbed down everywhere because you can only post things on these platforms which are compatible with advertisers. Big brands don't want to see their ads alongside someone's fringe opinions, thus they have to punish the "bad" content to appease their customers.

dmix• 7 years ago

People love to rah rah this stuff when it helps their ideology then wake up and find they’ve created an even bigger monster.

Politicians will change but this type of thing rarely comes back after it’s being given away.

all23• 7 years ago

People love to rah rah this stuff when it helps their ideology then wake up and find they’ve created an even bigger monster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

No one seems to understand that the monster they want to replace modern society with will consume them first.

Any major revolution, once properly entrenched, targets those who started the revolution.

eternalban• 7 years ago

Blaming "Big brands" for what could also be concerted effort by the owners of these "Big brands" and their friends to affect control over political speech.

Blaming advertising gets tiresome. It is a device, not the cause, of "dumbing down" of Western discourse and curtailing of free political speech.

If you insist that it is "advertising" that is the cause of this malaise, then you must agree that "advertising" is not compatible with modern free democtratic societies and needs to be made illegal.

Sessions• 7 years ago

If you insist that it is 'advertising' that is the cause of this malaise, then you must agree that 'advertising' is not compatible with modern free democtratic societies and needs to be made illegal

That's a leap. A quote that's always stuck with me: "It's important to recognise one of the catastrophist's rhetorical moves: Stories of doom thrive on turning a tension into an incompatibility."

It's more useful to think of the conversation we're having as the ongoing negotiation of a long-standing tension, with social media providing a new wrinkle.

zozbot234• 7 years ago

It's not just advertisers, it's any sort of controversy whatsoever. Monopoly platforms and walled gardens (FB, Twitter, YouTube etc.) don't want to deal with controversy, so they'd much rather silence such opinions. Federated or decentralized platforms are the only way to get sustainable freedom of expression on the web.

Jd• 7 years ago

I think that's only half true. If you were following the controversial social media engagement by the Trump campaign, it was clearly established that having two emotionally invested warring sides on either side of an opinion is a huge driver for platform engagement. So I think to some extent these platforms need highly contentious trending topics to be "relevant."

coldtea• 7 years ago

And not even society's at large Overton window.

It could be the "setting the tone" minority (pundits, influencers, journalists, etc) Overton window...

NotAnEconomist• 7 years ago

It absolutely is.

We've seen from CNN and Google that their views don't match society at large, and they're happy to use their positions of influence to "correct" society.

That's what caused CNN's ratings to collapse, and Google to face both a lawsuit (PragerU) and investigation (from Congress).

Did either stop them? Of course not -- they know better than you!

(If anyone wonders why my posts are dead -- it's because HN employs the same kind of Overton censorship, under the guise of policing tone.)

6gvONxR4sf7o• 7 years ago

It's not just the magical algorithms of twitter and facebook. This shows up with simpler algorithms that are nearly just "count upvotes." If I say something outside the overton window here, it's going straight to the bottom. I think its a feature of any algo that tries to help you not have to read the impossible 100% of things happening. It has to sort by something.

BlueTemplar5• 7 years ago

But at least it's other people, rather than a supposedly neutral company doing it...

BlueTemplar5• 7 years ago

Begging the question as to why websites like Twitter have still not been banned in democratic countries...

jakeogh4• 7 years ago

It's a walled garden of strong control. The rules are whatever they say they are. Delete that post and go stand in the corner.

Quazi-dictatorships are excellent at supressing minority thought. Majority rule countries will have no problem with Twitter.

vonmoltke3• 7 years ago

Algorithmic censorship has become the new norm. If you have opinions outside the Overton window you will be silently penalized on Twitter, FB, etc, and your posts will silently not appear. You have to go along with the tribe that you've been gerrymandered into or else you'll be silenced.

Algorithmic censorship, and demand for it, is the problem. However, that has nothing to do with Overton windows. The issue is the prioritization of recall over all else. Various groups (e.g., popular outcry, Legal) demand that as much actual abusive content as possible be flagged and suppressed or removed. In their view, falsely flagging content is acceptable collateral damage as long as the real bad stuff gets caught as well.

The precision in classification isn't there to enforce an Overton window even if that was the goal.

Mountain_Skies• 7 years ago

Sometimes their opinion of what constitutes real bad stuff isn't shared by society at large outside of their particular ideological group. It almost always boils down to punishing wrong think where some self anointed group gets to decide for everyone what is permissible thought. The really stupid part in all of this is the belief that these tools can't be taken away from them and used against them. History shows such power shifts can happen quickly and often with terrible results.

50656E6973• 7 years ago

Social media algorithms of course influence the Overton Window. It doesn't matter if the developers are consciously conspiring to do it or not; algorithmic bias is naturally inherent.

ipython• 7 years ago

I am flabbergasted at these sorts of posts. You can find posts from all parts of the political spectrum on Twitter. If there was truly "censorship" based on political stance it wouldn't be the cesspool that it is already.

What I don't get is this sort of discourse on a site filled with developers. If you don't like the established platforms, why don't you just create your own? The entire end-to-end vision of the Internet is still alive and well.

sacrificedcapon• 7 years ago

It isn't just social media. Google's censorship of their search results predates censorship on social media by a few years. It feels like a century ago, but traditional media and the elites attacked Google until Google gave in on censoring google news and google search.

Also, I think we distract ourselves when we blame "advertisers" for censorship. After all the top advertisers in the US are also the major media players - Comcast, AT&T, P&G, Disney, Charter, Verizon.

https://www.adbrands.net/us/top-us-advertisers.htm

So these media companies use their massive platforms to manipulate and control the public, they also use their advertising money to manipulate and control ( indirectly and directly ).

It isn't "advertisers", it is major mass media companies trying to control and influence new media. As has always happened, whether it is cable, radio, telegraph, etc.

thrower123• 7 years ago

I think incompetence is more likely. It doesn't take much of a ring of accounts flagging an account to get it temporarily suspended. There appear to be thresholds which will automatically suspend an account, pending appeal or review.

It's easy enough to have happen if you disagree with certain groups of extremely online people and they take a personal disliking, so it would certainly be within the power of any mildly capable security agency.

zaphirplane• 7 years ago

I don’t know the specifics here and clearly we can all agree that silencing government opposition views isn’t health. There is a subtly of tweeting this politician or governor is corrupt and we the people don’t like this vs these government pigs are evil and we should burn them. Perhaps dissenting views and aggressive violent tweets can be considered differently?

vonmoltke3• 7 years ago

The issue is detecting them, accurately, at scale.

LegitShady• 7 years ago

Remember when people were looking at the Arab Spring and saying "this will be covered on social media more quickly than traditional media"

But now it appears new media has become as bad as traditional media but with more influence and less competition.

I don't understand why twitter still exists.

corodra• 7 years ago

Right?

Didn't Twitter and other social media platforms lay claim to "helping" voice and organize the people to protest and revolt during the Arab Spring? I remember them being pretty proud of that.

formalsystem• 7 years ago

I've been closely following the revolution happening in Lebanon and I'll often see a notification like

"The following media includes potentially sensitive content" for content like https://twitter.com/encrier/status/1188067004240019456 Which translates to

* Retrieve people's money

* Resignation of government

* New parliament

Thank you Twitter for "protecting" me from being offended.

EDIT: I've been getting very angry everytime I see demands for censorship on social media, it's like people forgot they had their own revolution at some point and really needed to communicate what was happening to make it a reality.

detaro4• 7 years ago

Given it applies to everything they post it seems, could also be that the user set the flag to apply this to all their posts automatically. (I don't think there is a way of telling the difference)

lonelappde• 7 years ago

Why would you spend the time to write a comment that takes longer to write than to debunk? https://mobile.twitter.com/encrier

dessant• 7 years ago

Check "Display media that may contain sensitive content" at https://twitter.com/settings/safety to not have certain tweets hidden by default.

Users sometimes mark their tweets sensitive when they believe it may attract controversy, not just when it is genuinely disturbing.

BlueTemplar5• 7 years ago

Wow, talk about a 180° turn in just a few years!

aantix• 7 years ago

It’s as if Twitter’s models are trained to highlight the tweets that agree and are empathetic to the original tweet.

Users pile on with the “OMG yes this. This. This!” or “I don’t know why people like this exist “ and the rest of the crew are there to nod their heads.

There’s no discussion on Twitter. It’s either pats on the back or one liner screaming matches.

Twitter “Silenced” Dissenting Voices During Protests in Egypt: Research

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