SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter Inc on Tuesday revised its strategy for fighting abusive internet “trolls,” saying it would use behavioral signals to identify harassers on the social network and then limit the visibility of their tweets. San Francisco-based Twitter, known for freewheeling discussions since it was founded in 2006, has been trying to rid itself of harassment out of concern that personal attacks were driving people away. Twitter’s rules already prohibit abuse, and it can suspend or block offenders once someone reports them. Users can also mute people they find offensive. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said Twitter now would try to find problematic accounts by examining behavior such as how frequently people tweet about accounts that do not follow them or whether they have confirmed their email address. Tweets from those accounts will appear lower in certain areas of the service, such as search results or replies to tweets, even if the tweets themselves have not been found to violate any rules. “We want to take the burden of the work off the people receiving the abuse or the harassment,” Dorsey said in a briefing with reporters. Past efforts to fight abuse “felt like Whac-A-Mole,” he added. Tweets will not be removed entirely based on behavioral signals, Dorsey said. In tests the new approach resulted in a 4 percent decrease in abuse reports originating from search results and an 8 percent decrease in abuse reports from the conversations that take place as replies to tweets, according to the company. Most abuse comes from a small number of accounts that have an outsized impact, said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety. Social media firms including Twitter and Facebook are under pressure to remove bullies, many of whom target women and minorities. Many women cannot express themselves freely on Twitter without fear of violence, Amnesty International said in a report in March. Reducing abuse could also help Twitter’s business. If more people sign up and spend time on the service, marketers may buy more ads on it. Dorsey said that Twitter’s 336 million monthly active users should expect a series of other changes over the next several months as the company explores ways to encourage tweets that are more civil. In March, Twitter sought proposals from academics and others to help gauge the “health of public conversations.” Dorsey said the company is reviewing 230 submissions it received.
This is kind of a late announcement. I was shadow banned from 2016 to 2017 on twitter, its why I left.
Dylan Moore
disgusting. people act like Twitter is the second coming of Christ and applaud internet censorship. fuck this planet.
Elijah Campbell
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Daniel Bell
this tbh
David Collins
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Cameron Bell
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Mason Barnes
I'll still criticize them on Twitter anyway It's not like I'll have anything to lose
Connor Nelson
Thread over, social media is for genX normies and boomers.
Zachary Young
USER WAS ADDED TO (ANOTHER) GOVERNMENT WATCHLIST FOR THIS POST
Luis Robinson
Is this related to the user who got Eric Schmidt to step down because user fucked with the "protected groups" ads or some shit?
Kayden Campbell
What a coincidence. I have twitter blackholed in my local DNS resolver, along with facebook and mozilla. As far as my computer is concerned, those domains don't even exist.
It depends on the resolver. I have unbound (it comes with OpenBSD) and entries like this in /var/unbound/etc/unbound.conf : local-zone: "facebook.com." refuse local-zone: "twitter.com." refuse local-zone: "mozilla.com." refuse local-zone: "mozilla.org." refuse I used to just block them in /etc/hosts, but then you have to add each subdomain separately. With the resolver method, you block everything at once for that domain.
So will they be shadowbanning the president? He certainly seems to be pissing off everyone whether he actually says something offensive or not
Jaxon Campbell
Can you think of anything more lulzy?
Joshua Flores
Question: I get why you block Mozilla. I block Chrome too. Just wondering which browsers you personally use?
Landon Russell
I mostly use Lynx and Links, but sometimes Firefox when the others aren't good enough (javascript…) Since FF sends dildonics, errr I mean "telemetry" to mozilla, I block their domains. Actually I blocked a few other things too, because they showed up in tcpdump a bit after I started FF (without even typing in any URL, and with browser homepage set to localhost). Test it yourself and see what it connects to (also this might change for every browser release). Anyway that's a start. Later on I added some firewall rules to completely block any incoming/outoging TCP and UDP traffic, except for whatever IPs I temporarily add to a pf table. This is probably a bit too gonzo for most people, and it's not very practical, but that's the direction I'm heading towards. I already modified Lynx and Links to automate some of the table management for me, but I don't really feel like messing with Firefox code (plus I hardly use it). Anyway it's kind of a pain because some sites have a large pool of IPs, with redirection to other domains they own, etc. So then I made a custom proxy… It's quite a can of worms! One day I hope to get a real (old) computer again and not have to deal with botnet anymore.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'll dick around with that for awhile and see if it gets to be too much of a pain in the ass for me. I personally use Lightning a lot and Chromium sometimes, but still use Firefox when I have to.
Lucas Cox
Terry is the man Used to live in a van He's got a plan For a CPU without a fan
Wyatt Evans
Nice. I'd like to ask - is there any reason why you put a period after the domain name refused?
