This is an excellent article. Something bugged me about the "adult content spam" explanation for the Twitter issue when it circulated, but I couldn't put my figure on what it was. It just didn't feel like that story really held together for some reason. But this explanation totally makes sense, and is an important fact to keep in mind when evaluating any claims of this sort.
I agree with the point of this article. I don't use twitter search to search cities in China to find news any more. Because I found it's full of prostitution ad in years.
Biggest form of content moderation survivor bias I’ve seen is that the more awful a post is, the more likely the post will be quickly removed and the user banned. So the moderators end up having a very different perspective on a communities problems than the average users.<p>Biggest thing I know is most people have no idea just how extreme cyberbullying of transgender people gets online. There are cynical and evil small fraction of the population who simply think it would be funny to drive such people to suicide. Saw this repeatedly.
Wow this is just totally broken reasoning. Using twitter API and search you can only access the last 800-3200 tweets from each account and they have a timescales going back years…
> On November 24, 2022, a fatal residential apartment building fire broke out in Urumqi, China, killing several residents who had been locked into their apartments from outside as part of China’s zero-COVID effort.<p>Meanwhile in the states, we're more or less returning back to "normal" or perhaps pretending that COVID no longer exists. It's been 2+ years since the beginning of the pandemic, is zero-COVID goal even possible at this point...