Death by Algorithm

Dr Nifkin
Dr Nifkin
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

You might know me. I’m Dr. Nifkin from Twitter.com, a website with reporting tools designed to streamline their ability to admin the content as it pertains to their Terms of Service. To the average person, this may seem like an intuitive way to handle policing the volume of tweets that blast through on a given day, however in practice it’s a tool to silence regular people in favor of abusive CHUDs.

How the tool is supposed to function is simple. If a tweet violates their rules, a person can report it for the specific violation which cover a range of infractions. If someone says “I am going to fucking kill you”, naturally this violates their Threats Of Violence rule and the user will either be forced to delete the tweet and suffer a 12 hour lock or have their account suspended forever. If the world were this straightforward this would be an absolutely adequate use of a computer algorithm. As it happens, nuance is a thing that exists.

To illustrate my point, user @tepidbutter was suspended when he quoted Gary Busey at @six_foot_four about ripping out his endocrine system which was an inside joke between friends. Users stumbled across this tweet and determined it was a legitimate threat of violence, reported it, and the algorithm flagged it as abusive. @Tepidbutter was suspended. @Six_foot_four acknowledged that it was a joke between friends and that acknowledgement tweet was included in the appeal. As it turns out the appeal process is ALSO handled by an algorithm which cares not and the appeal was denied.

What is supposed to be a streamlined system to keep Twitter’s Terms of Service upheld is instead a tool that can be wielded by the very people who should be removed from the user base. All one has to do is coordinate a mass reporting of a tweet. Your average user with good intentions is not interested in hunting in this way leaving the users who seek to do nothing else but attack others with the means to do so.

Recently I wrote a tweet that said “RIP Osama Bin Laden. He might have had some bad ideas but he fought the soviets in the 80s. A war hero is still a war hero even if we disagree on some things.” This tweet was a CLEAR piece of classic satire aimed at the people eulogizing John McCain, a man who was a war hawk for his whole life and responsible for a massive loss of life. Many thousands of people got the satire as it was OBVIOUS. Of course, many people did not and they reported the tweet. What could they have reported the tweet for exactly? After searching through the Terms of Service it seems they went through the “Threats of violence” option though no threat of violence appears.

After 3 days up and thousands of shares and favs, I logged into to Twitter and got this message:

The clear bit of satire was completely missed by the computer algorithm because it’s an algorithm and not intelligent. Even worse, assuming the tweet was NOT satire, it still doesn’t violate the rule as stated. To violate this rule, the word “glorification” has to be defined so broadly that it’s a wonder every McCain eulogy wasn’t removed. After all, there are millions of people in the world whose children or parents have been killed because of him.

I went ahead and sent in an appeal. This was the response:

Once again, an algorithm handled the appeal. Also, there is no mention of the original violation and instead is a completely new one that’s even less applicable to the offending tweet.

Upon a 2nd appeal, this was the reply:

Another algorithm handled appeal with a completely new reason for denial. How any of the violations relate to the original tweet I’ll never understand. Algorithms don’t care. They just see mass reporting and assume people are being accurate.

Meanwhile people who DO glorify violence like @realalexjones and @drdavidduke and hell even @realdonaldtrump still have their accounts up and running.

@Jack and @mrdonut should do a better job in accurately running the site. I get using an algorithm for reporting if they can at least get a real person to look at the appeals. A real person would have reinstated @tepidbutter and would not force this tweet to be deleted.

Dr Nifkin

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Dr Nifkin

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