Twitter Struggles To Label Misleading COVID-19 Tweets (cnet.com) 95
Automated technology that Twitter began using this month to label tweets containing coronavirus misinformation is making mistakes, raising concerns about the company's reliance on artificial intelligence to review content. From a report: On May 11, Twitter started labeling tweets that spread a conspiracy theory about 5G causing the coronavirus. Authorities believe the false theory prompted some people to set fires to cell towers. Twitter will remove misleading tweets that encourage people to engage in behavior such as damaging cell towers. Other tweets that don't incite the same level of harm but include false or disputed claims should get a label that directs users to trusted information. The label reads "Get the facts about COVID-19" and takes users to a page with curated tweets that debunk the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory. Twitter's technology, though, has made scores of mistakes, applying labels to tweets that refute the conspiracy theory and provide accurate information. Tweets that include links to news stories from Reuters, BBC, Wired and Voice of America about the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory have been labeled. In one case, Twitter applied the label to tweets that shared a page the company itself had published titled "No, 5G isn't causing coronavirus." Tweets with words such as 5G, coronavirus, COVID-19 or hashtags #5Gcoronavirus have also been mistakenly labeled.
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That and anything msmash posts on Slashdot too :D
But in all seriousness, there is a lot more misinformation on Twitter that is a lot more harmful than tinfoil hat theories. There are entire threads on medical 'information' from 'health experts' anything from going vegan and homeopathy to making your reproductive bits smell better which could be incredibly harmful immediately.
Socratic Method (Score:3, Insightful)
The way people learn things that are true, is to be exposed to things that are false, and see them refuted.
Censorship, or the alternative "we've labeled this as something you shouldn't think about" just leaves people at the point of (precisely used as a term) ignorance.
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And, so we have the typical pro-ignorance mod of the "new Slashdot" as our example.
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And, so we have the typical pro-ignorance mod of the "new Slashdot" as our example.
Probably just someone who doesn't like you. (Not me, I don't even know you.)
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There are plenty of atheists here...
Here's how to really get modded down: declare theists and atheists alike to be presumptuous retards who drawn faulty conclusions from inadequate data.
I'm nothing if not equal-opportunity; I'll rain on everyone's stupid fucking parade. ;)
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Well, understood, but it remains that modding my original post "-1, flamebait" based on the actual content could be done by nobody other than a habitually lying fuckhead.
Mod or not. Good thing we'll soon be rid of them all, forever.
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You wish it were. But you are clearly worried about it enough to troll me.
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I'll bet you, oh, a thousand to one.
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Yes. Since he won't be having use for what he lacks, I guess we'll have to do our duty for those he can't satisfy.
Across all of them, that adds up to... wow. Definitely would benefit from your participation, for handling the scale.
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You know, Darwinian sexual selection at work. I assume you have no philosophical objection to that.
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That's what she said.
Oh, sorry, you'll be gone. Not relevant to you.
Re: Socratic Method (Score:1)
I thus solemnly declare theists and atheists alike to be presumptuous retards who drawn faulty conclusions from inadequate data.
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Here's how to really get modded down: declare theists and atheists alike to be presumptuous retards who drawn faulty conclusions from inadequate data.
People who do and don't believe that unicorns exist alike are presumptuous retards who drawn faulty conclusions from inadequate data.
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People who do and don't believe that unicorns exist alike are presumptuous retards who drawn faulty conclusions from inadequate data.
Saying "analogies aren't my thing" would have required fewer words.
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You can say they're not your thing, but that doesn't negate my point.
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Score 3, Insightful
Fuck; can't lose for winning.
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Imagine if Donald Trump could use the censorship tools to delete this very post of yours.
He's in power, just give him the tools and the will use em.
He doesn't need to (Score:1)
Us keyboard warriors can chat it up all we want on
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Yep.
And the more fun tools he got, the more fun tools he use.
You can kill a russian with an AK47.
repeating false information spreads it (Score:5, Informative)
The way people learn things that are true, is to be exposed to things that are false, and see them refuted.
That turns out not to be the case.
In actual fact, research shows that repeating something, even if you label it as false while repeating it, spreads false information.
It's a trick of the way memory is processed.
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In actual fact, you're making shit up.
Re: repeating false information spreads it (Score:2)
Oh wait...
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Have you ever been in a discussion with a religious person?
As soon as people are personally invested in something, they don't care about right or wrong, true or false anymore.
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Maybe we don't need Twitter to tell us not to set 5G towers on fire, but Twitter needs to tell us not to set 5G towers on fire.
If they do nothing there is liability there as they provide a platform to the people promoting this idea. You can imagine the arsonist's tweets coming up in court as evidence. They have probably taken legal advice on this.
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No, the platform doesn't have liability as long as they are a platform. Once they start censoring they are inserting their own bias and opinion and are no longer a platform but an editor.
Re:Not Jack's job (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when should some multi billion $$$ corporation decide what is ok to read or think or say? Wtf? Yes, the 5g cell tower burners are fucking idiots but why do we need Twitter Corp to tell us that? What else would Mega Corp like to tell us? How to vote? What our laws should be? Our ethics and moral standards? No thanks, I'd prefer a few cell towers burn to having some billionaires decide what we're all supposed to believe about anything.
Their platform, their property, their rules. They can do whatever the fuck they want when it comes to labeling or whatever. Don't like it, then do your commenting on a publicly own platform made with our taxes or in a public venue (which is where freedom of speech applies) or build your own twitter alternative.
Re: Not Jack's job (Score:1)
They can be a publisher with editorial control and therefore legal liability or they can be a telecom with no liability for user content. They can not be a publisher who takes editorial control of user content but only selective responsibility. If their lawyers advised that then they need new lawyers.
Re: Not Jack's job (Score:1)
As far as being private goes, no they still don't have unlimited authority on their own site. Communications are regulated. (Now see what I said above as it now applies with the additional information here).
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do your commenting on a publicly own platform made with our taxes or in a public venue (which is where freedom of speech applies)
Freedom of speech applies everywhere. The 1st amendment applies in public. Twitter is a public square. Twitter runs on public infrastructure. Twitter is generally available to the public.
Riddle me this: What would happen to Twitter if they claimed they were a private club/platform as justification for banning all Muslims?
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the easy button... Twitter invests a tiny fraction into these telecoms where 5g is being destroyed. Then they can release all texts to the police to round up suspects as it relates to personal property damage. Twitter, being a shareholder, is part owner of that equipment and I believe would be legally within their rights to release all information they had as to the destruction of their own property. You side-step all privacy and censorship debates in that regard.
It's his platform (Score:1)
You can start your own, just don't be upset when it takes extra time and effort because you're not able to leverage the work Jack did for you building an audience.
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Since when should some multi billion $$$ corporation decide what is ok to read or think or say?
Wtf?
They don't need to, they want to. Because surprise surprise not everyone wants to let the community hall they build turn into a cesspool of filth.
In short: AI sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
What we arrogantly call "Artifiial Intelligence" today has barely reached the level of intelligence of your average turnip.
Understanding language is hard. Harder than we could possibly imagine. The reason most of us can't even begin to grasp how hard it is is because we do it so easlily, without any conscious effort whatsoever.
Believe me, working in developping various fields of artificial intelligence like speech regonition, image recognicion, etc, is a lesson in humility if there is one.
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today has barely reached the level of intelligence of your average turnip.
In what field? We are already better at identifying cancer than well trained doctors. But we still can't decipher Trump's ramblings.
Intelligence is not universal, and some of the most intelligent people in one area a bloody atrocious in another. What AI lacks is general purpose intelligence, but it's pretty damn good at specifics.
This makes it worse (Score:5, Interesting)
In doing this, the Twitter idiots fail to realize this action only furthers all the conspiracy theories and misinformation out there. When something is banned or censored, that only serves to make people more curious and think "Hmm, they banned such-and-such, there really must be something to it."
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When something is banned or censored, that only serves to make people more curious and think "Hmm, they banned such-and-such, there really must be something to it."
And rightly so.
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
- Claud Cockburn
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I disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's just another failure of the market, this time the marketplace of ideas. The invisible hand seems to be too busy wanking off to make sure the good ideas bubble to the top.
Now watch for fast this gets modded down - anti freeze peach and anti capitalist!
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I doubt that. People who want to feel victimized will feel victimized, even in the absence of victimization. Besides, TFA isn't about banning tweet, it's about labeling them.
Paraphrasing a line I recently heard: One group of people start recording video because they are afraid they will be killed and the authorities will not lift a finger. Another group records video to prove how oppressed they are when a store required that they *gasp* wear a mask to protect other customers. Trust me, that second grou
Selective checking (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see any labels on tweets claiming Germany had a resurgence after lifting lockdown measures (said "resurgence" being part of a weekly pattern, an artifact). So it seems Twitter only cares about labeling "misleading" tweets that would argue against their preferred policy of lockdown forever.
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I don't see any labels on tweets claiming Germany had a resurgence after lifting lockdown measures (said "resurgence" being part of a weekly pattern, an artifact). So it seems Twitter only cares about labeling "misleading" tweets that would argue against their preferred policy of lockdown forever.
Well that should be obvious on account of @realdonaldtrump not being banned yet.
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Or maybe they just concentrate on the easily verifiable bullshit like 5g conspiracy theories.
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From a purely scientific viewpoint it would be harder to disprove the 5G conspiracy theories than clear statistics. Governments are still trying to study the effects of cell phone usage on the brain and various other body parts with varying positive and negative results in the studies. Counting people on the other hand is really easy.
Re:Freedom of speeech! Not central control. (Score:5, Insightful)
For citizens and residents of thr United States of America Twitter censorship must be prohibited.
Fuck you no.
Freedom of speech is about your right to say anything in a public venue or how the government *cannot* censure you (let alone conduct political persecution.)
It doesn't give you the right to say or do whatever in someone's private property.
Twitter is a private platform. Their house, their rules. This is no different from how, say, Costco manages its own stores.
I'm not saying this is good or bad. But how in the blue fuck can "citizens" not know this basic distinction is beyond comprehension.
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Does the same apply in spaces like malls? or streets?
Malls are private property. Streets (the ones not under private ownership) aren't. Please tell me you understand this fundamental difference.
Twitter, FB etc, have become public platforms and spaces.
Until they get subsidised and managed by governments, they aren't public platforms and spaces. They are popular privately-owned public platforms and spaces.
The inability to tell these two apart is depressing.
The argument of it being private died the moment they went live.
Argumentum ad absurdun.
Also given that these agencies and companies often work together they are a defacto arm of government, and therefore subject to the bounds of the US Constitution.
You think you have said something with this word salad sprinkled with legalese sophistries. You haven't. This is yet another case of "I *fe
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There has been cases ruling that malls can't kick someone out for quietly offering pamphlets. Likewise with private streets in a company town.
Private public spaces have different rules from purely private places, can't discriminate, cops don't need a search warrant to look around the public parts of a private store and such are examples.
Where twitter fits in is up to the courts, they're obviously not a street, mall or open to the public store and quite easy to avoid unlike the only mall in town or the stree
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It's simple. Can Twitter ban people for being Muslim?
If you think they can, then they're a private club.
If you think they can't, then they're a public space.
Twitter's site and service is not involved in any of the following where protected class protections come into play: Being a restaurant, hiring people, housing people, educating children, etc. If you believe Twitter can't ban Muslims for being Muslim, then either the 1st amendment comes into play because it's a public space (privately operated or not
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The corner store can't ban Muslims but they don't have to let the Jehovah's Witness's hang out inside and give out pamphlets.
Besides, we're talking about America, a segregated society, with a whole class of people, with a medieval label that no other country uses, where people are stripped of their civil rights for life. Right to bear guns removed as an example, all because a politician passed a law.
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Malls are private property.
Typically not. They're usually leases of public land.
Further, private or not, people can protest in and around the mall. Because the 1st amendment applies to that space.
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A mall, or a private street, lets say in a company town, still have the right to ban disruptive behavior. They perhaps can't ban someone from quietly offering pamphlets, but can ban someone from shoving them in someones face. I doubt that they'd have a problem banning questionable speech like how to rip the mall off or encouraging spitting in the mall.
Even in public, you can be charged with disturbing the peace for being too loud or obnoxious. Along with laws limiting signage and loudness being okay as long
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it stopped being private property when twitter engaged the government to use it for all government announcements. Twitter, like it or not, is now a media company. For the exact SAME reason an appeals court said that Donald Trump could NOT block people from saying hateful things about him using his @Id or posting on his facefuck page. . Because he is a government official, he gets no ability to block as that is tantamount to censorship. The ruling is already made, you cannot play the private property argumen
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it stopped being private property when twitter engaged the government to use it for all government announcements.
No it didn't. The courts were very clear on their limitation that only certain channels are implicated by their decision and not the platform itself. In other news the GP's local Costco doesn't magically become government property just because Trump shops their either.
Re: Freedom of speeech! Not central control. (Score:2)
Your wrong. If 75% of the population BELIEVES Taylor Swifts hit songs are public domain, guess what? They become so. This had been case law again, and again.
If 75% of the country BELIEVES Facebook is a public forum, IT BECOMES ONE. That simple. Why do you think Facefuck spends MILLIONS on attorneys trying to _educate_ people to the contrary? Because if they dont, they will lose everything. Its that simple. They fact you are not paying for the use only accelerates this inevitability. If they were to charge,
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Twitter is a private platform. Their house, their rules. This is no different from how, say, Costco manages its own stores
If that is the case, then government entities must be disallowed from using any of these private services for public consumption. Public/private partnerships like that are usually heavily regulated. You can't have maverick agencies using them as platforms while the private entity controls the flow of information.
Compare to if FEMA started buying all supplies from Costco and Costco arranged to buy all disaster blankets from companies the FEMA director's family controlled.
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Uh, did you miss the part where Trump and AOC were both ordered to unblock everyone, because they can't use the platform and block people? They explicitly must allow people the ability to speak to them, even if all people want to do is hurl insults and slurs at them.
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If that is the case, then government entities must be disallowed from using any of these private services for public consumption.
Why would that be the case? The courts have already ruled on such a case and determined that the right to speech exclusively applies to the government's channels on the private platform. This is why I can block your all-or-nothing arse from my feed, but @realdonaldtrump cannot.
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Freedom of speech is about freedom of speech.
The government doesn't come into play unless you're talking about the first amendment. That's separate and different.
The fact that you don't understand that, and that you're modded +5 (or more), Insightful, shows how far this site has fallen.
Further, Twitter is a public platform, running on public infrastructure. It is not a private club or company. It enjoys the safe harbor of not being liable for content it hosts because it is a carrier, not an editor. (Yet
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I think you have not understood freedom of speech then.
It is about solving problems through dialogue. It is about feedback loops, raising problems before they become too big.
This is currently being restricted on our largest communication platforms, due to "their platform arguments".
You could argue that. But why stop there? Should the ISP's and the phone companies not have the right to enforce "community standards"?
The upshot of your argument, is that the big tech companies get to decide what information you
"Trusted". Not a loaded word at all. (Score:1)
"Other tweets that don't incite the same level of harm but include false or disputed claims should get a label that directs users to trusted information".
"Trusted"... by whom? Mmmmm?
Educated Editors (Score:3)
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As far as I know, Slashdot has only banned 2 users, ethanolfueled and apk. Moderation is not censorship as you're free to read at -1
An Interest in seeing all sides of controversey. (Score:1)
I hope they look at my tweets to the director of the WHO from years ago taunting them as a genocidal organization for banning the therapeutic use of ozone to save Ebola victims in Sierra Leone.
https://health.forgivenesscapi... [forgivenesscapital.com]
WHO Director Tedros IGNORED my tweet. That's frustrating to me. Aren't social media platforms two way? If one uses a social media to broadcast - shouldn't they be able to be served notice by a simple comment back? And shouldn't that become public record of the controversy?
Don't we
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Interesting the government also stopped ozone treatment for covid19 too, there actually is peer reviewed studies and real world treatments with 1%-5% ozone in oxygen for 15 - 20 minutes at a time being effective against certain bacteria, fungus and virus in lungs. Poisons them more than it poisons the patient. Yes, ozone is poisonous, so is aspirin.
Putting someone on a ventilator for respiratory viral infection is 80+ percent the time a death sentence, already we see reports of oxygen and positioning hav
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Thanks Iggy. I don't recall every being backed up on slashdot. And I've been on this site since about 1995.
Critical thinking. (Score:1)
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It's easy (Score:2)
If twitter handle is "@realDonaldTrump" then fake
Not surprised. (Score:2)
Dont, then. (Score:2)
Twitter Struggles To Label Misleading COVID-19 Tweets
Then don't. Be a platform, not a publisher, and stop interfering in your users' conversations.
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