Science Twitter Suspending people for using Cyrillic - сука блять

Twitter is treating Bulgarians tweeting in Cyrillic like Russian bots
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People are having their accounts suspended and tweets hidden for the crime of using a different alphabet
By Vlad Savov@vladsavov May 22, 2018, 1:16pm EDT

A week ago, Twitter announced it would become more aggressive in pursuing trolls on its service, a move which seems to have had some unforeseen consequences, judging by the present upheaval in the Bulgarian Twitter community. An increasingly large and unhappy number of people have had their Twitter accounts suspended and messages filtered out of conversations, apparently for the offense of merely tweeting in Cyrillic.

Though the trigger for an account to be suspended hasn’t been specifically established, the prevailing hypothesis — based on users’ experience — appears to be that mentioning @YouTube or any other major account in Cyrillic will get one in trouble. Perversely, even if the initial tweeter isn’t affected, the chances of being suspended for anyone replying to such a tweet in Cyrillic are even higher. This problem has afflicted people with accounts dating all the way back to 2009, some of which have multiple thousands of followers. While I’ve been able to verify the experience primarily of Bulgarian users, this blight on Cyrillic Twitter use definitely appears to extend beyond just that community.

According to Twitter’s criteria, a user is declared to have “links” to the Russian government if it “frequently tweets in Russian” pic.twitter.com/vscVNZBBUh

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 1, 2017
Why is this happening? The most likely explanation is that Twitter has ramped up its algorithms for weeding out Russian bots and trolls, and since Russians use Cyrillic, the very use of the alphabet is being treated as a red flag. Except, you know, Bulgarians invented the Cyrillic script. It’s used in a bunch of Slavic countries outside Russia, and even within Russia, not everyone is actually a troll.

In @Twitter HQ:
‘OMG, we have so many Russian bots! Gotta stop them! But how?!’
‘Hm, they use Cyrillic...’
‘Oh? So start hidin tweets in Cyrillic!‘
‘But...’
‘Just do it!’
‘Done.’
‘Nice!.. Beer?’
(FUN FACT: Cyrillic is official script in >15 countries that are not Russia) pic.twitter.com/ku4x391fdP

— El señor más maduro (@VSchwarz) May 21, 2018
Innocent users are able to recover their accounts reasonably quickly after a suspension, but then Twitter still treats them like digital outcasts, showing “tweet unavailable” messages when they respond to a conversation thread and also muting them from sending notifications to others. If you want to know what the term “shadow banning” refers to, well, it’s basically this sort of treatment. It’s especially troublesome because when someone affected by it reaches out to Twitter’s support and help services, they’re told that their account isn’t banned and everything is fine. Except their friends can’t receive any notifications from them or see their contributions to group conversations.

Дам... може би търсеният ефект е някои диалози да изглеждат монолози#tweetunavailable pic.twitter.com/TQhK5kCLjy

— Sensum ☯️ (@vonegat) May 21, 2018
When reached for comment, Twitter took two days to respond with the following:

“We’re looking into this issue and will take any needed steps to resolve it, while continuing to take actions to enforce our terms of service and combat malicious networks of spam and automation.”

Ironically, even as it has grown into a functional customer service portal for many third-party companies to collect customer feedback, Twitter itself remains a profoundly unresponsive company and service provider. People without checkmarks already tend to feel unheard and neglected by Twitter, and this present episode only serves to bolster that impression.
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https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/22/17380630/twitter-moderation-cyrillic-russian-bots
 
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I think this is a good thing. I would have ordinarily just said "good" if not for pussified faggots who get triggered by that.

Seriously, though, nobody speaks Sputnik out of a certain shitty area of the world. Nobody even wants to see that fucking gibberish. Anyone who speaks Sputnik should be put against a wall and shot. Why should we trust people speaking in Sputnik?

They're obviously conspiring against us in their weird moon runes. Ban them all!

And that's really the most lenient option. We should really actually just kill them.
 
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Twitter is shit. The only thing twitter and facebook know how to do is fuck up. That's what happens when you teach lizard people to code.

Edit for typo. Oh look, an edit button. Something twitter doesn't fucking have.
 
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sjws: "immigrants shouldn't have to speak English just because you're, like, just SCARED of other cultures, you stupid nazi. People can speak whatever language they eant and shouldn't be censored."

also sjws: "HOLY SHIT WHAT DOES CYKA BLYAT MEAN? IS THAT A THREAT?! IM LITERALLY HYPERVENTHILATING THE RUSSIANS ARE OUT TO DESTROY OUR WAY OF LIFE THIS RUSSIAN BOT JUST USED FUNNY WORDS I DON'T UNDERSTAND, OH MY GOD, SOMEONE HELP. BAN THEM. IT'S THE COLD WAR ALL OVER AGAIN! NUKE SAINT PETERSBURG!!"
 
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AnOminous said:
I think this is a good thing. I would have ordinarily just said "good" if not for pussified faggots who get triggered by that.

Seriously, though, nobody speaks Sputnik out of a certain shitty area of the world. Nobody even wants to see that fucking gibberish. Anyone who speaks Sputnik should be put against a wall and shot. Why should we trust people speaking in Sputnik?

They're obviously conspiring against us in their weird moon runes. Ban them all!

And that's really the most lenient option. We should really actually just kill them.
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But if we ban foreign alphabets I'll have to go back to 3D women porn.
 
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This is delightfully stupid. It's okay if you type out Russian phonetically, but don't you dare do it in Cyrillic! What an asinine measure to take.

Wendish said:
I don't understand how they're able to do this with a straight face but are too afraid to touch Arabic Twitter which is just /pol/ with squiggles and more original content.

גויים מטופשים
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That's not Arabic.
 
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Wendish said:
Nobody was stupid enough to think that was Arabic, or autistic enough to assume I was trying to type in Arabic. What I typed definitely applies to you though.
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Okay? I guess I should've been more obvious with the "/pol/ is da jooz" joke.
 
REGENDarySumanai said:
Twitter suspends people for speaking a different language but can't even be half-arsed to put in an edit button, despite it being one of the most requested features? Priorities are definitely in order.
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Twitter has no reason to appeal to anyone but investors. It's already big, so people inherently want to invest in it. Nobody's going to leave the platform, it's a cascading effect where everyone uses it because everyone uses it. There's nothing they need to do except put in a few half-assed automated moderating features to keep the site nice and spiffy for more investors to buy stocks. Same with Facebook.
 
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