I am old enough to remember last year, when the practices of "countering russian trolls online" and other nice-sounding buzzword laden pretenses were discussed by Twitter under oath.
Twitter was targeting and silencing tweets under the #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeak hashtags, some of the most politically relevant issues of the time. Half of the #DNCLeak tweets were silenced. They estimate that 0.84-4% of the hashtag tweets were actually Russian related.
That is very revealing. Either they deliberately silence issues that have nothing to do with any foriegn influence operation like they claim, or they are incapable of distinguishing between the two when it matters. Either way the end result is the same, suppression of perfectly valid political expression under false pretenses.
I would love to live in a world where we could trust some of the richest, most powerful, and most influential companies in the world to always be straightforward and honest with us about everything. There is no indication we live in such a world.
Given the actions of these companies over the past year and a half I think my interpretation of events is more than justified.
Bottom of page six explains why the hash tags were targeted and had more to do with Wikileaks abusing their algorithms with spam than the other buzz word “Russia.” Another algorithm picked it up to be reviewed. It wasn’t like some bloke sits there and reads every single one to determine if it fits the companies ideology.
Not to mention that the emails were illegally obtained and therefore could be breaking Twitter’s terms of services and only less than half were targeted as flagged to be reviewed before placed in the “trending section,” not really silenced or deleted. If I was actually following joe blow who used the hashtag, I would still be able to read it. It was also less than half and I bet predominant users (those who actually have a large following and have the most chance of influencing another person’s opinion on the matte) were not silenced.
But that is actually the reason why those companies were meeting today anyway. How do we better our software to prevent false information from being shared while still allowing the average user to be heard.
Bottom of page six explains why the hash tags were targeted and had more to do with Wikileaks abusing their algorithms with spam than the other buzz word “Russia.”
Quoting the end paragraph of page 6, i'm not sure where you get the idea that a majority of this silencing was because of Wikileaks abusing algorithms. 118 out of 426,000 tweets were from Wikileaks. The primary reason for the silencing, as they claim, are because of their spam filters.
Considering even they admit barely a fraction of the relevant tweets were russian bots rather than unique users, one has to wonder whether their spam filters were mass silencing certain hashtags far beyond the bot rate by accident or by design.
"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas."
I am old enough to remember last year, when the practices of "countering russian trolls online" and other nice-sounding buzzword laden pretenses were discussed by Twitter under oath.
Twitter was targeting and silencing tweets under the #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeak hashtags, some of the most politically relevant issues of the time. Half of the #DNCLeak tweets were silenced. They estimate that 0.84-4% of the hashtag tweets were actually Russian related.
That is very revealing. Either they deliberately silence issues that have nothing to do with any foriegn influence operation like they claim, or they are incapable of distinguishing between the two when it matters. Either way the end result is the same, suppression of perfectly valid political expression under false pretenses.
I'm not sure how much credence we should give to this document, since it's coming from a Twitter official who has reason to paint the company's actions in a more responsible light, but you're referencing Twitter's deletion of automated tweets, tweets made by spambots. It doesn't matter if a spambot is Russian or American--an American spambot might not be part of a Russian campaign, but it's still a spambot. Automated tweeting is against Twitter's terms of service as well as against the principle of equal speech. You shouldn't be able to talk a hundred times louder than the average person just because you trained a computer to parrot your views.
Bottom of page six explains why the hash tags were targeted and had more to do with Wikileaks abusing their algorithms with spam than the other buzz word “Russia.”
Quoting the end paragraph of page 6, i'm not sure where you get the idea that a majority of this silencing was because of Wikileaks abusing algorithms. 118 out of 426,000 tweets were from Wikileaks. The primary reason for the silencing, as they claim, are because of their spam filters.
Considering even they admit barely a fraction of the relevant tweets were russian bots rather than unique users, one has to wonder whether their spam filters were mass silencing certain hashtags far beyond the bot rate by accident or by design.
"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas."
Russia isn't/wasn't part of their equation. It might have been why they were dragged in front of congress in the first place, but it had nothing to do with silencing of these hashtags.
What was mentioned was illegally obtained information being spammed through twitter in an attempt to get it trending by WikiLeaks.
Page 11:
"We learned that a small number of Tweets from several large accounts were principally responsible for the propagation of this trend. In fact, two of the ten most-viewed Tweets with #DNCLeak were posted by @Wikileaks, an account with millions of followers."
Twitter is like the game broken telephone. The original hashtag tweets originated from the spam that Wikileaks sent out. While others retweeted (considered a tweet in itself) other tweets were rewording what was said and adding the hashtag. It doesn't mean new information is being spread through each and every tweet that contains a certain hashtag.
If the companies internal automation already said "this hashtag is spam" then anyone using that hashtag will be considered spam until someone comes around and cleans out the folder. By the looks of it, there was more that went into silencing the tweets at only 25% and 48% respectively were silenced. out of the 426,000 tweets, 319,000 of them were still allowed to trend. That missing 106,500 could be nothing more than "low quality tweets." Without being able to qualify those tweets (as in able to see/read all 106,500 and see if any of them actually added anything new to the discussion), the over 300,000 that did get through still allowed the public to be informed about the leaks and what was present in them.
I am old enough to remember last year, when the practices of "countering russian trolls online" and other nice-sounding buzzword laden pretenses were discussed by Twitter under oath.
Twitter was targeting and silencing tweets under the #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeak hashtags, some of the most politically relevant issues of the time. Half of the #DNCLeak tweets were silenced. They estimate that 0.84-4% of the hashtag tweets were actually Russian related.
That is very revealing. Either they deliberately silence issues that have nothing to do with any foriegn influence operation like they claim, or they are incapable of distinguishing between the two when it matters. Either way the end result is the same, suppression of perfectly valid political expression under false pretenses.
I'm not sure how much credence we should give to this document, since it's coming from a Twitter official who has reason to paint the company's actions in a more responsible light, but you're referencing Twitter's deletion of automated tweets, tweets made by spambots. It doesn't matter if a spambot is Russian or American--an American spambot might not be part of a Russian campaign, but it's still a spambot. Automated tweeting is against Twitter's terms of service as well as against the principle of equal speech. You shouldn't be able to talk a hundred times louder than the average person just because you trained a computer to parrot your views.
Spambots don't have freedom of speech rights.
Twitter treated the silencing of these hashtags as the lowest level of confidence for how they approach potential bot accounts. They were silencing at the tweet level and asking to verify identity rather than banning like when they are sure or suspending when pretty confident. They also don't have to technically be spam to be flagged, they can be "otherwise suspicious" which could mean anything.
What this effectively means is that there is sound reason to believe people got caught up wrongly and simply had to give a phone number or complete a captcha, but we don't know how big of a percentage that is, because they don't tell us.
"Our systems are built to detect automated and spam accounts across their lifecycles, including detection at the account creation and login phase and detection based on unusual activity (e.g., patterns of Tweets, likes, and follows). Our ability to detect such activity on our platform is bolstered by internal, manual reviews conducted by Twitter employees. Those efforts are further supplemented by user reports, which we rely on not only to address the content at issue but also to calibrate our detection tools to identify similar content as spam. Once our systems detect an account as generating automated content or spam, we can take action against that account at either the account level or the Tweet level. Depending on the mode of detection, we have varying levels of confidence about our determination that an account is violating our rules. We have a range of options for enforcement, and generally, the higher our confidence that an account is violating our rules, the stricter our enforcement action will be, with immediate suspension as the harshest penalty. If we are not sufficiently confident to suspend an account on the basis of a given detection technique, we may challenge the account to verify a phone number or to otherwise prove human operation, or we may flag the account for review by Twitter personnel. Until the user completes the challenge, or until the review by our teams has been completed, the account is temporarily suspended; the user cannot produce new content (or perform actions like Retweets or likes), and the account’s contents are hidden from other Twitter users. We also have the capability to detect suspicious activity at the Tweet level and, if certain criteria are met, to internally tag that Tweet as spam, automated, or otherwise suspicious. Tweets that have been assigned those designations are hidden from searches, do not count toward generating trends, and generally will not appear in feeds unless a user follows that account. Typically, users whose Tweets are designated as spam are also put through the challenges described above and are suspended if they cannot pass."
Twitter treated the silencing of these hashtags as the lowest level of confidence for how they approach potential bot accounts. They were silencing at the tweet level and asking to verify identity rather than banning like when they are sure or suspending when pretty confident. They also don't have to technically be spam to be flagged, they can be "otherwise suspicious" which could mean anything.
What this effectively means is that there is sound reason to believe people got caught up wrongly and simply had to give a phone number or complete a captcha, but we don't know how big of a percentage that is, because they don't tell us.
I agree that there will certainly be genuine posters who were asked to confirm their identity before allowing their tweets to be openly viewed - but I don't see why that's such a problem. That 'I'm not a robot' verification step is something I've had to do many times on-line - it's actually a requirement before making any posts at all to a lot of websites.
As others have said there are 2 different things going on here. The large numbers you're referring to of tweets 'silenced' are due to them being flagged as potentially breaking Twitter's rules on automation. The smaller numbers you're then comparing these to are the numbers of Russian-linked tweets / accounts.
Returning to the point I made yesterday though, I don't see that simply doing nothing is a reasonable alternative. Even if you ignore the automation issue entirely (and I don't think they should), the numbers of Russian-linked tweets on some subjects were noticeable (about 2% of #DNCLeak for instance). If no action were taken against those that proportion could easily increase very quickly over time just because using automation is so cheap and easy. Taking no action would also be a message in itself of the political leanings of Twitter (that they're OK with foreign interference for instance). I'm quite certain that they would receive a lot of criticism if they tried to go down this route - in fact Twitter has indeed been criticized a lot for its failure to respond to automated posting in previous years.
So Trump’s bullying tactic against Canada seems like it won’t fly. Canada knows this too, and expect them to troll the president right back, call his bluff and watch him squirm next week:
Then what was Trump's point I wonder. Just another conspiracy theory and lie maybe.
*shrug* Not sure. I tend not to pay too much attention to what he says these days, just like I don't pay attention to any other arrogant blowhards I run across from time to time.
We should probably talk about the fact that the death toll in Puerto Rico has now been revised to be basically the same as the 9/11 attacks. Something that could have only been prevented with a mass humanitarian aide effort from the federal government that never came. It's an indictment of the Administration for sure, but we've already talked about that at length when it happened and at other times. It is just as much an indictment of the media and the general public for not caring enough about it to even make front-page news.
I remember about 4 or 5 days into Katrina coverage watching CNN with my late grandmother and saying to her "when do you think one of these anchors is going to mention that every one of these people stranded in New Orleans is black??" Eventually, they did do so. Let's just admit most Americans don't give a shit about Puerto Rico because they don't think they are real Americans.
No city or state could have handled the aftermath of that hurricane, much less an island with no voting rights. Only a massive intervention from the federal government could have saved more lives. It wasn't a priority. Houston was. Puerto Rico wasn't. Draw your own conclusions. It's time for Puerto Rico to get statehood YESTERDAY. Enough of this colonial bullshit.
I heard an interview yesterday with San Juan Mayor Cruz. She was very critical of other officials in Puerto Rico for not confronting Trump about the need for a better response to the hurricane, but I can appreciate they were in a difficult position. The argument was that Trump would not react well to criticism and they would thus be better just going along with his assessment rather than confronting him.
As Trump doesn't seem to have a sense of shame, but is very sensitive to anything that smacks of personal criticism, I think the other officials were correct about how he would have reacted. Mayor Cruz did try a more confrontational route herself, but it's not clear that resulted in any improvement in material support - though arguably it helped retain her political credibility and self-respect.
Let's just admit most Americans don't give a shit about Puerto Rico because they don't think they are real Americans.
I'd like to think "most" Americans don't feel that way.
It seems a vocal minority of Americans do feel that way. By "vocal" I mean not necessarily about this issue, but vocal as in loud and obnoxious in general with a sense of entitlement.
It wasn't a priority. Houston was. Puerto Rico wasn't. Draw your own conclusions. It's time for Puerto Rico to get statehood YESTERDAY. Enough of this colonial bullshit.
The Justice Department has sided with plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Harvard University by a group claiming that the university discriminated against Asians by attempting to limit the number of Asians admitted to the college. It seems that the reasoning is that (1) Harvard was found to have accepted fewer Asians than would a racially-neutral college would given their test scores and other qualifications, and then (2) failed to prove in court that there was an explanation besides discrimination.
Newspapers and media outlets use to get stuff like this weekly, if not daily. They use to ignore it as just another nut job.
After Trump’s constant attacks and the recent assault on a Maryland newspaper (which are not related), news organizations are no longer taking any chances.
It also wasn’t too long ago that the world condemning the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Extremist, regardless of political or cultural affliation needs to be called out before another preventable tragedy happens.
Newspapers and media outlets use to get stuff like this weekly, if not daily. They use to ignore it as just another nut job.
After Trump’s constant attacks and the recent assault on a Maryland newspaper (which are not related), news organizations are no longer taking any chances.
It also wasn’t too long ago that the world condemning the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Extremist, regardless of political or cultural affliation needs to be called out before another preventable tragedy happens.
The suspect used the exact phrase "enemy of the people" in his threats. Wonder where he came up with that one. As I have been saying for months, it's not a matter of if someone is murdered because of this rhetoric, but when and how many.
He is also now implying (as I predicted over a year ago) that the Lester Holt interview in which he admitted he fired Comey because of the Flynn and Russia investigations is fake. And this is why one seeks to obliterate the truth. Because eventually, even video or audio evidence will be seen as suspect. You'll recall there were reports last year of him insisting to White House staff that the voice on the Access Hollywood tape was not really him.
Trump declared the economy the best ‘EVER.’ Now he says federal employees won’t get cost of living adjustments because of economic problems.
The guy who has spent $77 million (cost via https://trumpgolfcount.com/) of the taxpayers' money in 20 months dragging staff and Secret Service to his self-dealing golf resorts weekend after weekend, says an old lady who processes government forms all day in a tiny cubicle is overpaid.
Alright, this is where the line simply has to be drawn. The Trump Administration is now just flat-out trying to STRIP citizenship from people who have official birth certificates. Seemingly because SOME midwifes supposedly issued American birth certificates to children born in Mexico anywhere from 30-70 years ago. This issue came up in the Bush Administration, ended very early in the Obama Administration, mostly due to a lawsuit from the ACLU and is now being ramped up to unprecedented levels under Trump.
First of all, the burden of proof here should NOT be on people who have had legitimate documentation for decades. There is no real way for the government to prove what they are alleging, yet the burden is on legitimate American citizens to produce proof BEYOND the normal documentation any of us (meaning not Hispanic or having brown skin) would have to provide??
Let's be VERY clear about what this is, and what this is all about. The Trump Administration is interested in one thing, which is preventing this country from becoming a white minority within the next couple of decades. And frankly, no matter what they do about illegal immigration, or legal immigration, that die has already been cast. So this is next logical step. And that step is stripping full-fledged Americans of Hispanic descent of their very citizenship based on (at best) flimsy suspicions and claims from decades in the past. This is nothing but an attempt at ethnic cleansing of those of Hispanic descent who live near a border. An expulsion of certain people based on their race, and basically nothing else. You have a birth certificate?? Screw you, show us more papers. If you show is those papers, we probably still won't let you back in, because who the f**k is going to stop us??
Let's go over how this is going to end up working going forward: 1.) Do you have brown skin and a Hispanic name?? 2.) Do you live near a border?? 3.) Are you trying to re-enter the country or renew your passport?? If you check all 3 of these boxes, they are going to try retroactively take away your citizenship. It can happen here. It IS happening here:
I don't know how many times in the past I have said it was impossible to let this xenophobic immigration hysteria out of the bag without violating the rights of US citizens who come from the same cultural background or geographical location as those suspected of being illegal. Now we aren't just violating their rights, we seem to be taking active steps to remove them altogether. But if you are a immigrant citizen, or legal resident who hails from south of the border, and live in a border state, it might be time to throw every piece of documentation you have in the glovebox of your car, your wallet, or your purse. Because sooner or later, Trump's stormtroopers are going to demand to see it. And even then, it will guarantee you nothing.
The reality (not that that has any importance to Trump) is rather different. This research showed that up to 2017 the US lost in 89% of the 129 cases where other countries complained about its behavior. However, in the 114 cases where the US was complaining about other countries it won 91% of them. This just reflects the case that complaints are normally only made where a country is pushing beyond the boundaries of what is allowed under the WTO (and the US has done plenty of that in past years even before the current issues over steel and aluminum tariffs).
What Trump appears to believe is that the US would get a better deal if it were free to use its economic muscle on other countries (i.e. bully them). I think the chance of that making the US better off is pretty much non-existent. There's a better chance that the US would lose less than other countries - and hence arguably become comparatively more powerful. However, even that is pretty dubious as it assumes that all other countries act independently over their dealings with the US. If international relations continue on the current path, I imagine that new international coalitions will eventually form, without the US in them - allowing other countries to get the benefits of working together without having to deal with the US. That process is of course already under way in certain areas - for instance international action on climate change and trade with Iran.
Yeah if the US doesn't wanna play we can go on without them.
His supporters seem interested only in this amorphous concept of "winning", which means Trump has to present every international relation with every country as some sort of battle to be won, and every country as a foe to be conquered or put under our heel in some way, shape, or form.
Losing in court in and of itself isn't a sign of being wronged.
Maybe there was merit to the cases. l mean maybe American companies who can do bad things like exploit slave type labor all over the world deserved to lose their cases.
NAFTA talks allegedly soured last night according to the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers (its behind a pay wall so I can’t post), allegedly about its conflict resolution chapter that the US wants to scrap and Canada wants to leave in place as is.
I can see Canada walking away today and Freeland applying the tear tactic again (it worked beautifully in getting the EU deal done).
This government knows it cannot be bullied this early in a US presidency especially with the Alberta/B.C. Pipeline on hold (but that is another frickin mess I don’t have time to get into).
Here is hoping for once, no bad news comes out about Trump so he doesn’t have a reason to deflect news to an easy target. But with McCain’s funeral this weekend, he is going to be wounded that he isn’t the centre of attention.
Losing in court in and of itself isn't a sign of being wronged.
Maybe there was merit to the cases. l mean maybe American companies who can employ slave type labor all over the world and deserved to lose their cases.
We aren't interested in being held to account for anything. This is what happens when nearly the entire population thinks their country is uniquely exceptional and superior to all other countries.
NAFTA talks allegedly soured last night according to the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers (its behind a pay wall so I can’t post), allegedly about its conflict resolution chapter that the US wants to scrap and Canada wants to leave in place as is.
I can see Canada walking away today and Freeland applying the tear tactic again (it worked beautifully in getting the EU deal done).
This government knows it cannot be bullied this early in a US presidency especially with the Alberta/B.C. Pipeline on hold (but that is another frickin mess I don’t have time to get into).
Here is hoping for once, no bad news comes out about Trump so he doesn’t have a reason to deflect news to an easy target. But with McCain’s funeral this weekend, he is going to be wounded that he isn’t the centre of attention.
I used to see Chrystia Freeland all the time on PBS political shows during the Bush Administration when she was a journalist. Always liked her. Had no idea she was Canadian or that she would rise to such a prominent position.
Trump is attempting to use the “National Security” excuse to place tariffs on Cars made in Canada if we don’t sign on. Canada is already fighting that excuse with the WTO with the steel tariff which is more believable than cars.
If this deal dies, which it will, there is only one person to blame and Canada will ride this out till November where they will place pressure on American businesses that rely on exporting to Canada with more Tariffs of their own.
Trump declared the economy the best ‘EVER.’ Now he says federal employees won’t get cost of living adjustments because of economic problems.
The guy who has spent $77 million (cost via https://trumpgolfcount.com/) of the taxpayers' money in 20 months dragging staff and Secret Service to his self-dealing golf resorts weekend after weekend, says an old lady who processes government forms all day in a tiny cubicle is overpaid.
Also hours after effectively giving pay cuts to millions of public workers and disabled veterans, Trump Proposed a $100 billion gift to the richest 1%.
Unilaterally, without approval from Congress he wants to index capital gains to inflation. What's this mean, you ask. This move would effectively be a tax cut to benefit the richest Americans, 86 percent of the benefits of this change in tax policy would go to the top one percent, the rest to would be given to mere millionaires who are the people who pay the vast majority of capital gains taxes. They don't pay income taxes like us working schlubs.
Trump ignores the law, governs for the top one percent, and doesn't give a damn about the rest of us.
Edit:
BTW the $100 billion is ***four times*** the amount he took from federal workers.
And it's supposedly to combat the **same thing**. The 2% fed employee raise is to offset inflation. The changes in the article are to index capital gains against inflation. Shows his priorities.
Be interesting to see how this "booming" economy would function if all our federal workers didn't show up for a week (or even a day or two).
And of course, most raises given out are simply to keep up with inflation, the increased price in goods and services. Any year you DON'T receive a raise, you are effectively making less money.
Comments
Not to mention that the emails were illegally obtained and therefore could be breaking Twitter’s terms of services and only less than half were targeted as flagged to be reviewed before placed in the “trending section,” not really silenced or deleted. If I was actually following joe blow who used the hashtag, I would still be able to read it. It was also less than half and I bet predominant users (those who actually have a large following and have the most chance of influencing another person’s opinion on the matte) were not silenced.
But that is actually the reason why those companies were meeting today anyway. How do we better our software to prevent false information from being shared while still allowing the average user to be heard.
Bottom of page six explains why the hash tags were targeted and had more to do with Wikileaks abusing their algorithms with spam than the other buzz word “Russia.”
Quoting the end paragraph of page 6, i'm not sure where you get the idea that a majority of this silencing was because of Wikileaks abusing algorithms. 118 out of 426,000 tweets were from Wikileaks. The primary reason for the silencing, as they claim, are because of their spam filters.
Considering even they admit barely a fraction of the relevant tweets were russian bots rather than unique users, one has to wonder whether their spam filters were mass silencing certain hashtags far beyond the bot rate by accident or by design.
"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal
tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater
detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas."
Spambots don't have freedom of speech rights.
What was mentioned was illegally obtained information being spammed through twitter in an attempt to get it trending by WikiLeaks.
Page 11:
"We learned that a small number of Tweets from several large accounts were principally responsible for the propagation of this trend. In fact, two of the ten most-viewed Tweets with #DNCLeak were posted by @Wikileaks, an account with millions of followers."
Twitter is like the game broken telephone. The original hashtag tweets originated from the spam that Wikileaks sent out. While others retweeted (considered a tweet in itself) other tweets were rewording what was said and adding the hashtag. It doesn't mean new information is being spread through each and every tweet that contains a certain hashtag.
If the companies internal automation already said "this hashtag is spam" then anyone using that hashtag will be considered spam until someone comes around and cleans out the folder. By the looks of it, there was more that went into silencing the tweets at only 25% and 48% respectively were silenced. out of the 426,000 tweets, 319,000 of them were still allowed to trend. That missing 106,500 could be nothing more than "low quality tweets." Without being able to qualify those tweets (as in able to see/read all 106,500 and see if any of them actually added anything new to the discussion), the over 300,000 that did get through still allowed the public to be informed about the leaks and what was present in them.
What this effectively means is that there is sound reason to believe people got caught up wrongly and simply had to give a phone number or complete a captcha, but we don't know how big of a percentage that is, because they don't tell us.
"Our systems are built to detect automated and spam accounts across their lifecycles,
including detection at the account creation and login phase and detection based on unusual activity (e.g., patterns of Tweets, likes, and follows). Our ability to detect such activity on our platform is bolstered by internal, manual reviews conducted by Twitter employees. Those efforts are further supplemented by user reports, which we rely on not only to address the content at issue but also to calibrate our detection tools to identify similar content as spam. Once our systems detect an account as generating automated content or spam, we can take action against that account at either the account level or the Tweet level. Depending on the mode of detection, we have varying levels of confidence about our determination that an account is violating our rules. We have a range of options for enforcement, and generally, the higher our confidence that an account is violating our rules, the stricter our enforcement action will be, with immediate suspension as the harshest penalty. If we are not sufficiently confident to suspend an account on the basis of a given detection technique, we may challenge the account to verify a phone number or to otherwise prove human operation, or we may flag the account for review by Twitter personnel. Until the user completes the challenge, or until the review by our teams has been completed, the account is temporarily suspended; the user cannot produce new content (or perform actions like Retweets or likes), and the account’s contents are hidden from other Twitter users. We also have the capability to detect suspicious activity at the Tweet level and, if certain criteria are met, to internally tag that Tweet as spam, automated, or otherwise suspicious. Tweets that have been assigned those designations are hidden from searches, do not count toward generating trends, and generally will not appear in feeds unless a user follows that account. Typically, users whose Tweets are designated as spam are also put through the challenges described above and are suspended if they cannot pass."
As others have said there are 2 different things going on here. The large numbers you're referring to of tweets 'silenced' are due to them being flagged as potentially breaking Twitter's rules on automation. The smaller numbers you're then comparing these to are the numbers of Russian-linked tweets / accounts.
Returning to the point I made yesterday though, I don't see that simply doing nothing is a reasonable alternative. Even if you ignore the automation issue entirely (and I don't think they should), the numbers of Russian-linked tweets on some subjects were noticeable (about 2% of #DNCLeak for instance). If no action were taken against those that proportion could easily increase very quickly over time just because using automation is so cheap and easy. Taking no action would also be a message in itself of the political leanings of Twitter (that they're OK with foreign interference for instance). I'm quite certain that they would receive a lot of criticism if they tried to go down this route - in fact Twitter has indeed been criticized a lot for its failure to respond to automated posting in previous years.
He claims the left is violent, so they'd better not lose, I guess?
#counterconspiracytheory
https://globalnews.ca/news/4415687/nafta-threat-against-canada-experts-legality/
I remember about 4 or 5 days into Katrina coverage watching CNN with my late grandmother and saying to her "when do you think one of these anchors is going to mention that every one of these people stranded in New Orleans is black??" Eventually, they did do so. Let's just admit most Americans don't give a shit about Puerto Rico because they don't think they are real Americans.
No city or state could have handled the aftermath of that hurricane, much less an island with no voting rights. Only a massive intervention from the federal government could have saved more lives. It wasn't a priority. Houston was. Puerto Rico wasn't. Draw your own conclusions. It's time for Puerto Rico to get statehood YESTERDAY. Enough of this colonial bullshit.
As Trump doesn't seem to have a sense of shame, but is very sensitive to anything that smacks of personal criticism, I think the other officials were correct about how he would have reacted. Mayor Cruz did try a more confrontational route herself, but it's not clear that resulted in any improvement in material support - though arguably it helped retain her political credibility and self-respect.
It seems a vocal minority of Americans do feel that way. By "vocal" I mean not necessarily about this issue, but vocal as in loud and obnoxious in general with a sense of entitlement. Amen brother.
Newspapers and media outlets use to get stuff like this weekly, if not daily. They use to ignore it as just another nut job.
After Trump’s constant attacks and the recent assault on a Maryland newspaper (which are not related), news organizations are no longer taking any chances.
It also wasn’t too long ago that the world condemning the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Extremist, regardless of political or cultural affliation needs to be called out before another preventable tragedy happens.
He is also now implying (as I predicted over a year ago) that the Lester Holt interview in which he admitted he fired Comey because of the Flynn and Russia investigations is fake. And this is why one seeks to obliterate the truth. Because eventually, even video or audio evidence will be seen as suspect. You'll recall there were reports last year of him insisting to White House staff that the voice on the Access Hollywood tape was not really him.
The guy who has spent $77 million (cost via https://trumpgolfcount.com/) of the taxpayers' money in 20 months dragging staff and Secret Service to his self-dealing golf resorts weekend after weekend, says an old lady who processes government forms all day in a tiny cubicle is overpaid.
First of all, the burden of proof here should NOT be on people who have had legitimate documentation for decades. There is no real way for the government to prove what they are alleging, yet the burden is on legitimate American citizens to produce proof BEYOND the normal documentation any of us (meaning not Hispanic or having brown skin) would have to provide??
Let's be VERY clear about what this is, and what this is all about. The Trump Administration is interested in one thing, which is preventing this country from becoming a white minority within the next couple of decades. And frankly, no matter what they do about illegal immigration, or legal immigration, that die has already been cast. So this is next logical step. And that step is stripping full-fledged Americans of Hispanic descent of their very citizenship based on (at best) flimsy suspicions and claims from decades in the past. This is nothing but an attempt at ethnic cleansing of those of Hispanic descent who live near a border. An expulsion of certain people based on their race, and basically nothing else. You have a birth certificate?? Screw you, show us more papers. If you show is those papers, we probably still won't let you back in, because who the f**k is going to stop us??
Let's go over how this is going to end up working going forward: 1.) Do you have brown skin and a Hispanic name?? 2.) Do you live near a border?? 3.) Are you trying to re-enter the country or renew your passport?? If you check all 3 of these boxes, they are going to try retroactively take away your citizenship. It can happen here. It IS happening here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html?utm_term=.793b084c6084
I don't know how many times in the past I have said it was impossible to let this xenophobic immigration hysteria out of the bag without violating the rights of US citizens who come from the same cultural background or geographical location as those suspected of being illegal. Now we aren't just violating their rights, we seem to be taking active steps to remove them altogether. But if you are a immigrant citizen, or legal resident who hails from south of the border, and live in a border state, it might be time to throw every piece of documentation you have in the glovebox of your car, your wallet, or your purse. Because sooner or later, Trump's stormtroopers are going to demand to see it. And even then, it will guarantee you nothing.
The reality (not that that has any importance to Trump) is rather different. This research showed that up to 2017 the US lost in 89% of the 129 cases where other countries complained about its behavior. However, in the 114 cases where the US was complaining about other countries it won 91% of them. This just reflects the case that complaints are normally only made where a country is pushing beyond the boundaries of what is allowed under the WTO (and the US has done plenty of that in past years even before the current issues over steel and aluminum tariffs).
What Trump appears to believe is that the US would get a better deal if it were free to use its economic muscle on other countries (i.e. bully them). I think the chance of that making the US better off is pretty much non-existent. There's a better chance that the US would lose less than other countries - and hence arguably become comparatively more powerful. However, even that is pretty dubious as it assumes that all other countries act independently over their dealings with the US. If international relations continue on the current path, I imagine that new international coalitions will eventually form, without the US in them - allowing other countries to get the benefits of working together without having to deal with the US. That process is of course already under way in certain areas - for instance international action on climate change and trade with Iran.
Maybe there was merit to the cases. l mean maybe American companies who can do bad things like exploit slave type labor all over the world deserved to lose their cases.
I can see Canada walking away today and Freeland applying the tear tactic again (it worked beautifully in getting the EU deal done).
This government knows it cannot be bullied this early in a US presidency especially with the Alberta/B.C. Pipeline on hold (but that is another frickin mess I don’t have time to get into).
Here is hoping for once, no bad news comes out about Trump so he doesn’t have a reason to deflect news to an easy target. But with McCain’s funeral this weekend, he is going to be wounded that he isn’t the centre of attention.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/08/31/bombshell-leak-to-toronto-star-upends-nafta-talks-in-secret-so-insulting-remarks-trump-says-he-isnt-compromising-at-all-with-canada.html
Trump is attempting to use the “National Security” excuse to place tariffs on Cars made in Canada if we don’t sign on. Canada is already fighting that excuse with the WTO with the steel tariff which is more believable than cars.
If this deal dies, which it will, there is only one person to blame and Canada will ride this out till November where they will place pressure on American businesses that rely on exporting to Canada with more Tariffs of their own.
Unilaterally, without approval from Congress he wants to index capital gains to inflation. What's this mean, you ask. This move would effectively be a tax cut to benefit the richest Americans, 86 percent of the benefits of this change in tax policy would go to the top one percent, the rest to would be given to mere millionaires who are the people who pay the vast majority of capital gains taxes. They don't pay income taxes like us working schlubs.
Trump ignores the law, governs for the top one percent, and doesn't give a damn about the rest of us.
Edit:
BTW the $100 billion is ***four times*** the amount he took from federal workers.
And it's supposedly to combat the **same thing**. The 2% fed employee raise is to offset inflation. The changes in the article are to index capital gains against inflation. Shows his priorities.
And of course, most raises given out are simply to keep up with inflation, the increased price in goods and services. Any year you DON'T receive a raise, you are effectively making less money.