Share this page!

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
Twitter logo
23 May, 5 tweets, 2 min read
A remarkable thread about messed up corporate power hierarchies. It's worth highlighting something else the story illustrates: the standard way to "solve" online abuse and harassment is to experiment on the victims of abuse and harassment with no consent or transparency.
No surprise here, of course. We all know this is how tech platforms work. But should we take it for granted? Is there no alternative? No way to push back?
It's not A/B testing itself that's the problem. Indeed, in this instance, A/B testing *worked*. It allowed @mathcolorstrees resist a terrible idea by someone vastly more powerful; something that would probably have made Twitter's abuse problem much worse.
But it's all useless without the right protections for both employees and users. The author was laid off right after this and the manager could easily have found someone else with less competence and integrity to do their bidding.
In conclusion, A/B testing is one of myriad tools used by the tech industry that are powerful, potentially useful, prone to misuse, poorly understood, nontransparent, and completely unregulated.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @random_walker

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
20 May
This brilliant, far-too-polite article should be the go-to reference for why "follow the science" is utterly vacuous. The science of aerosol transmission was there all along. It could have stopped covid. But CDC/WHO didn't follow the science. Nor did scientists for the most part.
The party line among scientists and science communicators is that science "self corrects". Indeed it does, but on a glacial timescale with often disastrous policy consequences. Our refusal to admit this further undermines public trust in science.
See also @Zeynep's excoriation of public health agencies, including the comparison of their covid responses with the way 19th century Londoners afraid of "miasma" redirected sewers into the Thames, spreading Cholera even more nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opi…
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
17 May
The "tech" part of tech companies has gotten easier while understanding its social impacts has gotten much harder. This trend will only accelerate. Yet most tech co's have resisted viewing ethics as a core competency. Major changes are needed, whether from the inside or outside.
I love pithy analogies but this one breaks down quickly. The world will be better off without fossil fuels. But a world without computing technology is outside the Overton window. Like it or not, we must work to reform the tech industry.
I like it. I'd love to read a detailed take on what tech activism can learn from food and environmental activism.
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
3 May
35 million U.S. phone numbers are disconnected each year. Most get reassigned to new owners. In a new study, @kvn_l33 and I found 66% of recycled numbers we sampled were still tied to previous owners’ online accounts, possibly allowing account hijacking. recyclednumbers.cs.princeton.edu
It’s well known that number recycling is a nuisance, but we studied whether an adversary—even a relatively unskilled one—can exploit it to invade privacy and security. We present 8 attacks affecting both new and previous owners. We estimate that millions of people are affected.
Unfortunately, carriers imposed few restrictions on the adversary’s ability to browse available numbers and acquire vulnerable ones. After we disclosed the issue to them a few months ago, Verizon and T-mobile improved their documentation but have not made the attack harder.
Read 6 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
27 Apr
At Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (citp.princeton.edu) we're hiring our first ever communications manager. Public engagement is a first-rate goal for us, so we are looking for someone to work with us to maximize the public impact of our scholarship.
To explain how CITP differs from most academic groups, I'm happy to share a new case study of our (ongoing) research on dark patterns. It includes many lessons learned about conducting and communicating tech policy research effectively, and how CITP helps. cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publi…
The communications manager is a hybrid role. This includes familiar tasks such as managing a website and social media, but also close collaboration with researchers on tasks such as co-authoring an op-ed or figuring out the right analogy to explain a tricky concept.
Read 5 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
17 Feb
Were you told that successful researchers must constantly "keep up" with research in their fields? In my experience, that's both stressful and inefficient to the point of being useless. New papers may be released every day but actual knowledge doesn't accumulate at that rate.
Paying too much attention to the so-called cutting edge of research leads to a loss of perspective and results in incremental work more often than not. If you want to do foundational research, it probably doesn't rely on a preprint that was released last week.
Here's the process I've used for about 10 years. When I see a new paper, I put it in a big list organized by topic. I don't read it right away. Once in a while, I notice that a collection of papers on a topic have resulted in meaningful progress, and I read the papers together.
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
12 Jan
There are no unmoderated speech platforms. Email may be the closest, but even email at a large scale is complex enough that you have to use intermediaries. (The Princeton Election Emails Corpus confirms no Trump emails since Jan 6 electionemails2020.org/entity/59a162d…)
Of course, relatively unmoderated platforms like Parler are themselves subject to the standards of other intermediaries. It's platforms all the way down.
Some people want social media platforms to be neutral and apolitical. But a major value proposition of speech platforms is their recommender algos and moderation policies that amplify some voices and suppress others. They can’t make those decisions in a politically neutral way.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @random_walker has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @random_walker!

Read all threads by @random_walker

:(