According to a former Twitter employee, the platform’s dependence on machine learning techniques causes Elon Musk’s company to misinterpret images of rockets as pornographic material.
Due to the uncertainty, some Twitter accounts that were reporting on rocket launches had their accounts suspended.
An unnamed former worker on Twitter’s content control systems was interviewed. The tools have a history of mistaking suitable images for sexual stuff, they claimed, according to the source. This could, for instance, be a pedicure shot with a lot of pixels that are flesh-colored.
You can see how a rocket may be mistaken for another object, the former employee told.
According to the former Twitter content moderator, a Twitter account may be suspended if the tools are 95% convinced that a message violated the platform’s policies.
According to the research, Twitter could lower the precision criteria of the machine learning technologies that differentiate sensitive content if it wished to rely less on human moderators rather than reporting every post as incorrect.
The former worker told Quartz that this would result in more inaccurate censorship and an increase in error rates.
Around half of the company’s employees were let go after Musk acquired Twitter in late October, including several employees in charge of content moderation.
After publishing information regarding a SpaceX launch on Tuesday, Spaceflight and Starbase Watcher, which monitors activity at SpaceX’s Texas site, Michael Baylor, who broadcasts NASA launches live, and Spaceflight Now were all shut out of their accounts.
John Kraus, a photographer for spaceflight missions, claimed that after sharing a video of NASA’s Artemis I launch, his account was similarly suspended. Since then, all four accounts have been unlocked.
Twitter tagged Spaceflight Now’s tweet as “violating our rules against posting or distributing privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their express agreement,” according to a screenshot viewed by Insider.
In a similar vein, Starbase Watcher reported that Twitter suspended its account after discovering that one of its tweets included explicit material.
Baylor’s colleague tweeted that Musk about the suspension of his account, to which Musk replied, “looks like our image recognition needs some improvement!”
The blunder hasn’t simply occurred under Musk’s direction. An astronomer’s Twitter account was previously restricted for months after a meteor video she tweeted was labelled as “intimate content,” according to the BBC.
Insider’s request for a comment, conducted outside of regular US business hours, did not immediately receive a response from Twitter.
