When some measures go too far, what happens?
Laura Marston, a healthcare activist, inadvertently showed how the new safety mode can affect legitimate discourse on the platform. The account connected to Nancy Pelosi was directed at by Marston. The Speaker of the House blocked her account after she sent a message.
Fight and organize for the people. The Nancy Pelosi account is on social media.
The account Marston replied to on Sunday which led to the block. The team pelosi account just sent a message about how every single House Democrat voted for a bill to cap copays for diabetes care. The Pelosi account pointed out that193 Republicans voted no.
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The important information that Marston wanted to add was not included in the tweet. The bill only capped copayments for people with insurance, not the price of the drug. Those without insurance are still paying high amounts for life saving medication. She added her comments to the original post. There was no aggression or harassment. There was a fair critique by Marston.
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When she tried to access the Team Pelosi account, she noticed a prompt on the screen.
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The message reads, "You're temporarily autoblocked from viewing and interacting with the account." We flagged your interactions as potentially abusive when they were in Safety Mode.
The autoblock, directed at the social networking site, quickly went viral.
Safety Mode is a new feature. When activated in a users settings, Safety Mode will temporarily block accounts for a period of 7 days for using potentially harmful language or repetitive sending and replies. This is a problem on the platform and a tool to limit this can be a welcomed feature. The Safety Mode feature has been rolling out across the platform over the past couple of months.
This is a case where the algorithm was wrong. The most unfortunate case for a false positive to occur is when a person advocating for a cure for a disease gets blocked by a powerful public official.
It is possible that this block is in violation of the first amendment. Courts have ruled that a public official using a social media platform for public business is akin to a public forum, which means blocking users from accessing or interacting with it is in violation of their rights. There have been distinctions. A public official's personal account is not a public forum if it posts about politics. The official account of the Speaker of the House can be found here.
It is a bad look for a politician to block users, especially progressive activists who make up their base. Maybe they should not be in Safety Mode.
The feature can accidentally block the wrong users. It says on its prompt that it doesn't get it right all the time, and it's working on improving detection. If we hear back, we will update this post.
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