BackAlgorithmic filtering, censorship on Twitter, Facebook?
Outrage over suspension of some Twitter accounts, firm does not offer any reason for the technical glitch
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Mumbai: On Saturday morning, @shikha_shrivas tweeted: Dear @twitter, many twitter accounts were suspended today in a very suspicious manner by twitter India. Am sure they will be restored." Some hours later, Lutyens’ Goswamy @thebakwaashour tweeted: “What The heck..........Feeling ashamed , my twitter account was not suspended. I feeling down .Why Twitter India Why !!."
The ‘#Twitter India’ tag was abuzz with protest tweets such as these that streamed in from early morning on 1 November, following suspension of some accounts by microblogging site Twitter.com.
The buzz grew when the co-author of Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India Rupa Subramanya protested early morning on Twitter that her account was suspended. What also irked her was that she was being asked to “change her behaviour".
At 1 pm, Twitter Inc. acknowledged on its official country handle @TwitterIndia that “The issue with the accidental suspension of some accounts has been resolved. Regret the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience."
Users, though, are still irate that the company did not offer any reason for the technical glitch.
“This is the thing that gets me. If this were a technical glitch, why ask me & others to change our ‘behaviour’," tweeted @rupasubramanya.
The company, of course, did not explain why the glitch took place even as many in Twitterverse alleged that “right wing" accounts were being targeted.
Twitter accounts are generally suspended for violations of its rules.
Twitter says on its website: “We may also suspend accounts for investigation if we suspect an account has been hacked or compromised... In order to keep Twitter safe, we may ask you to provide additional information before you can be unsuspended. For example, you may be asked to provide a phone number or to confirm your email address... If you suspect your account is suspended, log in to Twitter.com. You should see a prompt informing you that your account is currently suspended."
One can submit a form at https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended if an account is suspended.
However, technical glitches apart, Twitter periodically suspends accounts for a variety of reasons where it also uses editorial judgement or censorship.
On 20 August, hours after a video purportedly showing the brutal beheading of American journalist James Foley started circulating online, Twitter said it is “actively" suspending accounts that share the gory images.
On 15 June, Twitter pulled the account belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after the radical Sunni militant group posted photographs of its violent activities in northern Iraq, including a mass execution.
The move was “denounced" by @wikileaks.
On 30 April 2012, The Washington Times had reported that conservative Chris Loesch, music producer and husband of radio host and CNN contributor Dana Loesch, had his Twitter account suspended. He was notified of his suspension via an email from Twitter claiming it was due to multiple unsolicited mentions to other users. “You will need to change your behavior to continue using Twitter," the email admonished.
“If Twitter is indeed using an algorithm that allows user accounts to be reactively suspended according to malicious whims, that’s a threat to free speech for everyone—regardless of individual political views...," The Washington Times had then said.
It’s not that algorithmic filtering or censoring is restricted to Twitter. It’s also there on Facebook and even Google.
University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued in 14 August article on medium.com that while Ferguson (the unrest that began after police shot and killed an unarmed black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri) is about many things including race and policing in America, it is also about the Internet, net neutrality (not allowing data networks to charge for speedier Internet access) and algorithmic filtering.
She observed that while Twitter was abuzz with the Ferguson news since morning, her Facebook feed got “very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson" only the next morning.
“Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank"—or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now— seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more. But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure...
“Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?" asked Tufekci, adding, “Algorithms have consequences..."
According to a blog post on the official blog of audience data analytics firm, Umbel Corp., “...Media companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google should be held to the same rigorous standard to which we hold our news organizations..."
It cited three ways that “Facebook, Google, and other black-box-algorithm-powered content distribution services can fulfil this mission".
The first is to explain the black box process. “Even the most complicated filtering techniques have reasoning that explains why that particular technique is superior to others... As long as it exists in a place easily findable and readable (which means not in the Terms of Service), people won’t complain about a lack of transparency.
“Second, and perhaps more radical, they can give the ability to toggle between a stream and feed in the central place...and, third, companies should call out their own censorship and publish their reasons for hiding certain pieces of information."
Again, said the blog, “it does not need to be hidden in the Terms of Service or elsewhere; the content can be on the company blog."
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