DENCY_NATION 🏴‍☠️

Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there's a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures. @nikitabier @brave My friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for "inauthentic behavior". His appeal was swiftly denied. Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened. Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so - and this does seem plausible - everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk. This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates. More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user's refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being "security" and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself. Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker - humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay's appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out. Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus. Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn't necessary.