It takes a lot to get me to try to report a twitter user for offensive content — I’m usually happy enough to simply be liberal with the block button (I block, on average, 3 or 4 people a day). But there have been a grand total of two occasions on which someone was so egregiously awful I thought it necessary to report them. One was a guy who was spamming with over-the-top death threats from multiple accounts, and taunting me with his knowledge that Twitter would do nothing about it. Another time, it was someone who was sending me explicit crime scene photos — rotting bodies, bloody suicides, decapitated or disemboweled people. So I tried to send complaints.
The Twitter complaint submission form is a nightmare — it’s a perfect example of putting up a bureaucratic roadblock to prevent people from complaining. These two cases were so extreme that I struggled through several pages of ridiculously detailed inquiries, submitted the final form, and sat back, thoroughly convinced that this was a cynical pretense by Twitter and that nothing would be done.
I was right. The accounts still exist, and I got back the usual dodgy form letter that said no, there was nothing bannable about either of those people.
I’m a guy. I probably get a greater than average number of death threats and incoherent hate mail, but it’s nothing compared to what many women see — appearing online as a woman, a transgender person, or a gay person is regarded by a lot of trolls as an invitation to harass (heck, just dyeing your hair is an excuse). Lindy West describes her experience, and the experiences of other women, who try to get Twitter to enforce their own policies.
Twitter ought to be embarrassed. It’s a service that is approaching ubiquity — when the 24 hour news channels regularly report what’s streaming across Twitter at every event, it seems to be becoming representative — but the content is descending to the quality of YouTube comments, and Twitter does nothing. Rape threats, death threats, hounding people with non-stop trolling…it’s all become the common currency of the Twitter experience. You can get banned for harassment, apparently, but in every case where I’ve seen it happen, the jerk only has to promise not to do it again, and they’re right back in business…and they go right back to their old tricks, knowing that the reporting process is so cumbersome and slow, and that Twitter is so lenient, that any punishment slapped down upon them will be little more than a weekend off the spam/troll beat.
What’s Twitter?
Google it ;)
Didn’t Twitter just promote some big partnership they were doing with somebody to help stop this kind of thing? Doesn’t sound like it was effective.
Twitter, twitter, twitter…
Isn’t it that the internet filter where important complex things get turned into simple hyperbolic trash? Sort of like a shizzolator for authoritarian-speak?
I once applied for a job that required having a Twitter account, so I got myself one. Immediately, three women I didn’t know asked me to follow them. I declined.
(I never got an interview, let alone the job.)
Having no interest in being limited to 140-character messages, I never used the account. This post makes me doubly glad of that.
Twitter is far from approaching ubiquity. It still doesn’t have a business model and it still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. Maybe it’ll become a news hub, maybe it’ll become a troll-hive like Reddit. The management doesn’t know, so it keeps it options open.
Why is it that every time a post about a particular platform/site appears, people immediately set in on calling it awful? If you don’t like twitter, don’t use it. But it’s far from useless or ridiculous. Yeah, it has a lot of problems. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with the format. It’s short-form communication, similar to news tickers. Every bit of news in the last year or two that I’ve seen has broken on twitter up to hours before it hit any media news outlets, and often was more accurate even after the traditional media had a couple of days to research it. It’s a fast way for activists to organize and mobilize. It’s a way to keep up with people without the heavy time/effort involved in sites like facebook, and without providing nearly as much personal information to the site. It can function like an rss feed to monitor news sites and blogs. It’s quite good for the things that it does. Its biggest problem is what AlexanderZ said – it doesn’t know which functions it wants to encourage and which it wants (and needs) to curb.
Adding to Carlie @7, a lot of important events the past year I’ve learned about only on twitter. It’s not that other media outlets were slow to pick them up, they didn’t pick them up at all, or would have ignored them if not for awareness being made on twitter. It gives people a voice who didn’t have a voice before. Like anything else you can make of it what you want but don’t bash it if you haven’t tried it. Following the Ferguson protests and others by the people on the ground has been fascinating and horrifying. Also, while there is a 140 character limit, you can still link to sites and post pictures, and you know what they say about pictures.
I’d report the dead body picture troll to the DHS. After all, you’re a public figure receiving graphic death porn, high time to see if all these taxes we pay for homeland security are worth it.
Brony,
Ever since Ferguson, I’m not so quick to knock Twitter. How it’s managed, now that’s another thing and that’s what PZ is addressing.
@ carlie, HappyNat
You are quite right about the benefits. I saw it’s usefulness around here as well. Maybe there is a better way to use humor to poke at the downsides without ignoring the good sides. I’ll think about that.
But making fun of Twitter by name is not mocking the format. And I don’t have to try it to bash it based on what I hear from what people experience.
Seriously all the “twitter r bad” people need to go have a read of all the Ferguson threads, here and all over the internet. The vast majority of what we have about the goings on there is coming from Twitter.
If you tweet a complaint about a company, the company will sometimes respond to the tweet because they don’t like negative tweets floating around. You could tweet that twitter’s complaint process is ridiculous. It seems unlikely they will respond. Perhaps if you get a thousand people to tweet in one day but that might be difficult to coordinate. Companies will respond if they think their image is endangered
@ Beatrice
Same general answer as 11. I’ll think of a better way to mock the issues that stem from the specific problems so I don’t step on the usefulness to activists.
Brony – I know; it wasn’t you mainly I was reacting against, just that it seems to happen every time.
One good example is happening now, in fact – Something went on in Florida last night in Delray Florida, which doesn’t seem to have risen to the level of “news” anywhere else, but is another example of police overreach. According to the tweets (by an elected official, so for what it’s worth I would think he’d have a lot of incentive not to lie to create a ruckus) cops stormed an outdoor party, maced a pregnant woman and a few children, and changed their story three or four times as to why they were even there. Maybe it will rise to the level of being granted the legitimacy of “news”. Could pan out to be something, might not. But without a quick-acting platform, wouldn’t even know about it.
“Not everything about twitter is awful, therefore you should stop saying mean things about it.” I guess you could replace ‘twitter’ with just about anything else and it would still be just as stupid an argument. Scientology, bluegrass music, spinach. But in most cases it’s possible to make it through the average day without being beaten over the head with those other things. Not so for the twitter.
I don’t know if it’s overall a good thing or a bad thing, I only know that it’s utterly inescapable. If twitter existed only to twitter users, only to people who wanted to see it, it would be different.
comfychari,
Scientology is despicable by definition – it’s outright harmful, bluegrass music as far as I know can’t hurt people and is enjoyable to some, and spinach is just delicious so don’t you dare say otherwise.
Twitter inescapable, really? I’ve been escaping it quite easily for a while now. If I’m not interested in the topic, I skip the links in any given thread – just as I would links to any other source.
@6 AlexanderZ
Yep. And in the meantime rape threats, death threats, and harassment are all engagement that builds traffic so Twitter is more than happy to encourage them.
Unless the harassment is directed to someone like Robin Williams’ daughter shortly after his death. Then they clean house. For regular folks? Nope.
I enjoy Twitter. None of my Ohio red-neck family members have found me so there’s that. The best thing is all the like minded people I’ve found. Where else would educated, atheist, veteran, progressive animal lovers find each other?
I’m a nobody though so just blocking and muting works well.
Plus I get great pleasure that I’m blocked by Ted Nugent, James Woods, Adam Baldwin and Elizabeth Lauten. Nugent, Woods and Baldwin are all RWNJ pussies too cowardly to actually join the military. A$$wipes!
Was that directed at my statement? Because it wasn’t “you should stop saying mean things about it”, it was “not everything about it is awful, therefore I’m tired of people saying it’s entirely awful”.
On top of needing individual sites, such as Twitter, to handle these things better, I think we need something more. We need at least one internet behaviour record. Kind of like a crime record, only it should include verifiable records of bad behaviour that doesn’t rise to the level of “criminal”. And instead of recording just a person’s real name, it could record ip addresses etc. I think this would have at least two benefits: 1) these sites already need to handle these problems, this would just make it so they don’t have to each expend as much resources doing it individually, being banned from one site could automatically have consequences for using or signing up to other sites 2) I suspect it would decrease the load further by being a more effective deterrant to bad behaviour.
Of course it’s easy for me to propose, but who knows, maybe it’s not a good idea or something.
In Australia death threats are ignored until somebody is killed; then the police go into action. It’s a good system for the cops because most of the victims are unknown and unimportant so there’s never much of a fuss.
sherylyoung@19,
Gendered insults (“pussies”) are frowned on here. Please don’t use them. Thanks.
I don’t tweet. No need.
I’m deeply uninterested in anything so trivial, or immediate, that you could Tweet about it. Tweets, based upon those posted, are so full of emotionalism and the falsehoods that surface immediately but evaporate with time, that they are useless. Better to simply wait for the dust, BS and hyperbole to settle a bit and then figure out what, if anything, happened, and how I feel about it.
lorn
Most of what we know about Ferguson and other connected events is coming from tweets.
I can see the problem of this kind of o-line harassment causes. I can see one the strengths of o-line communication is anonymity, it is also what facilitates the nasty voice from the mob to speak.
It is easy to multiply your voice it seems for those who are so motivated. It does look like any rules and policies that are proclaimed are not enforced in any consistent way, I think probably is true with official laws also but that may be a separate issue or maybe not.
It is very easy and cheep to make rules and proclaim policies (and laws) but enforcing them requires expenses, the outlay of funds hiring people to do the work of enforcement. I have not noticed much in the way of eagerness for that aspect of rules and policies in businesses nor government.
PZ can surly testify to what an necessary hassle it is just to keep this blog cleaned up, I am sure it eats into his time more than he would prefer and I am personally grateful for his efforts in doing so.
PZ is not trying to become a billionaire nor take over the world unlike so many internet entréemanures.
uncle frogy
@Wolsey Bradley
I believe WAM is partnered with Twitter to try and reduce harassment. I think the system works by informing WAM first, and they go over the reports they get and the most urgent ones get sent to the top of the list with Twitter. Something like that, anyways.
I do agree that Twitter is pitiful with banning or suspending harassers, though. They suspend someone and then that person immediately makes a new account to use until their suspension is lifted…aaaand Twitter does nothing about it.
I think that the title of PZ’s post sums up the situation perfectly: Twitter’s management have no fucking idea of what they have wrought, and their attempts to curate, control and monetise it have been spectacularly ham-fisted.
@Speed0spank, that’s what I was thinking of. I knew I’d read something about that. However, having to go to an outside party a Twitter use may have never heard of, isn’t terribly useful, I don’t think.
What’s Twitter?
It’s a large social network site that smug assholes like to pretend they don’t know about, as though being unaware of major cultural phenomena makes one look smart.
Twitter and Facebook are pretty close to being natural monopolies. That means they should be put under democratic control. (No wonder Twitter doesn’t have a business model.)
Unfortunately the UN is completely unable to handle them or anything vaguely similar.
I have never used Twitter and probably never will. That said, I agree with a previous poster who says if you don’t like it (for the way they tolerate harassers, or for any other show-stopper) stop using it. If enough people abandoned it, they’d get the message quickly. Since women are the odds on favorite for being harassment targets, they should take their business to an alternate site that offers the same convenience but has a real anti-harassment policy that is easy to use and is taken seriously by management. If there is none, that looks like a market failure that some enterprising person can exploit/remedy.
IMO, the failure of the twits at twitter (management) to fix this problem means only one thing: they think it will cost them. First there is the cost of paying enough people to screen complaints so that they can stop using the complaint form as a flow restricter. Then they would have to redesign the complaint entry form, and also come up with a real policy to handle complaints and prevent known offenders from getting back in. Finally, and probably most costly, is the never-ending PR effort they will need, to counter the harassers’ lies and howls of rage about being blacklisted. The twits probably figured that as long as they were the only game in town, why stir the hornets nest of all the crazy/evil harassers out there, when the victims are really easy to cow into submission. Nothing will change until the victims and their sympathizers demand it, and back up their demands with boycotts or abandonment, whether or not there is a good-guy replacement available.
The twits apparently think a well-enforced, strong anti-harassment policy will cost them. It is up to the victims and their sympathizers to show them that its absence will cost them more. That’s the only way I think victims will get results.
Wolsey Bradley @3 and speed0spank @27,
It looks like WAM’s tool for reporting Twitter harrassment has been closed.
“The first phase of our project is now completed, which means this form is no longer active.”
https://womenactionmedia.wufoo.com/forms/wam-twitter-harassment-reporting-tool/
They then direct people to Twitter’s own reporting page. (sigh) They only ran this “pilot” for three weeks!
Is Twitter reluctant to create a simple removal process because they don’t want advertisers to be subject to it?
I hear people dissing bluegrass music. They need to look up Crooked Still on YouTube. And Béla Fleck. And a few others.
Twitter is quite, erm, interesting sometimes. I use it to passively follow the news from a couple of people and organisations. But I do not participate in the “rough & tumble” there. So that’s an option, too.
My grad school lab was a flaming hotbed of bluegrass — my advisor was a banjo player, and quite good at it. I learned to respect it very quickly.
I see that someone tried to compare Twitter with a cult and with a style of music that takes a high level of skill in order to play it properly.
A textbook example of “analogy fail”.
So Naked Bunny, from two words you conclude smug asshole? How about old fart who just doesn’t need one more distraction? It’s not like I miss anything by not twitting. Not when I have PZ, Ed and Kos.
I don’t do that much tweeting, but I follow a great many people of interest on twitter, and I have a bunch of twitter-lists that I’ve organised them into. Recently I realised that I could add a twitter account to a list without actully “following” them, which means that certain people don’t pollute my default timeline, I only see their latest output if I go and look at the relevant list’s timeline.
I find this a less intrusive way of keeping up to date with certain folks than it would be if I got an email every time they updated their blog, and it’s simpler than winnowing through a pile of RSS feeds. It’s a highly flexible, negligently imperfect but nonetheless powerful tool for dipping into the zeitgeist. As always, other folk’s mileage may vary – I totally grok why some people are far more active engagers with others than twitter than I, and also grok why some don’t find that it suits them at all.
I’d like to see some other social networks arise to offer users a safer space than either Facebook or Twitter, the logistical problem with that is that the Big Two are so simple to use and the networks they’ve out-competed years ago already tried many of the solutions being offered here and were simply not appealing enough to sufficient users to survive. Tumblr does quite well in minimising the amount of abuse it is even possible to deliver to another user, which is exactly why so many status-quo reactionaries loathe it with a passion, but the downside of that is not having the same sort of mainstream media impact.
I find that not being too emotionally attached to the Twitter experience insulates me from a great deal of potential aggravation. If I suspect that somebody is playing with culture warrior rhetoric of one kind or another in my Twitter mentions, I simply block or mute them, depending on whether I want them to know that I can’t see them any more or not. Learning enough about how the platform works to use the available tools to curate one’s feed is the only way to fly, IMO.
None of what I’ve written above means that I’m satisfied with Twitter management’s weak-sauce approach to the harassment and intimidation rampant on their platform. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for the average user experience that their business model relies upon i.e. delivering eyeballs to their advertisers, and I can’t see how their current level of laissez-faire shrugging is sustainable. I’m just not quite sure what particular clusterfuck it will take on their platform to make them step up.
Here’s where I pipe in to be smug about Kos.
What’s Kos?
Testing
Why is it that every time a post about a particular platform/site appears, people immediately set in on calling it awful? If you don’t like twitter, don’t use it.
Why so defensive, carlie? Do you actually think the behavior PZ describes here is acceptable? If Twitter is as useful and beneficial as you say it is, shouldn’t you be joining us in demanding better support from its management?
The more necessary a particular service is, the more necessary it is for its managers to keep it from being degraded by scumbags. That’s why we have laws against obscene and harassing phone calls, mail fraud, wire fraud, etc.
Since women are the odds on favorite for being harassment targets, they should take their business to an alternate site that offers the same convenience but has a real anti-harassment policy that is easy to use and is taken seriously by management. If there is none, that looks like a market failure that some enterprising person can exploit/remedy.
So in other words, if there’s a market failure, we should all just have faith that the market will stop failing.
Here’s another idea: let’s treat such services as a public good and regulate them accordingly, like we did with our postal and phone systems. Remember when obscene phone calls were a widely-known problem? They’re less of a problem now because we made laws against it, and enforced them. So if we really want to solve a problem, we should actively do what is known to work, instead of passively trusting something that doesn’t work to magically start working.
I guess I’m just a twit who refuses to tweet. I do have an account out there, but can’t figure out what to use it for. Facebook seems to satisfy my need for social media, namely, keeping up with the doings of my family and friends
Reporting people on Facebook is less complex and daunting, but gives an equal sense of utter futility with its pointless questions and requirement to categorize a problem in only one of an inadequate set of categories. But at least Twitter gives you a response that they won’t do anything. Facebook does nothing and doesn’t tell you about it, ever.
Hey, maybe twitter totally is full of silly people saying silly pointless things and maybe you are totally too important or busy or smart for such nonsense or whatever, but in this conversation it kind of comes across to me as hearing about a crime at a nightclub that was ignored by the staff and instead of saying how awful the staff are for that, people start talking about how the people who go there dress badly and have silly haircuts and they’d never be caught dead there anyway. Like, who’s in trouble here, twitter, as in the actual coded website and it’s management, or twitter, as in the people who use it and make the content? Why focus on the people with the least amount of power to change those policies and most at risk of harm due to those policies?
If Twitter gave you a thousand character limit instead of 140, would the abuse form magically become more effective? I’m guessing not. The character limit may be inconvenient for how some people would prefer to express themselves, but it isn’t the problem with twitter any more than the problem with a hat is that it’s not good at hammering nails.
Hey, maybe twitter totally is full of silly people saying silly pointless things and maybe you are totally too important or busy or smart for such nonsense or whatever, but in this conversation it kind of comes across to me as hearing about a crime at a nightclub that was ignored by the staff and instead of saying how awful the staff are for that, people start talking about how the people who go there dress badly and have silly haircuts and they’d never be caught dead there anyway.
Why is that wrong? If you hear about bad things happening at a certain place, it’s perfectly natural to ask why people would go there, given what we already know about it. And if management refuses to do anything about the assholes who come to their place, then it’s perfectly natural to talk about the assholes one finds at that place. Seriously, dimespin, what’s your point?
Markos Moulitsas, the host of a kind of blog with many authors. It’s against the Republicans. http://www.dailykos.com/
Ugh sorry, about the blockquote fail, first time I’ve ever used it.
The petty crime of talking about trivial things on twitter just is not even in the same dimension as stalking and harassing people on mass…
Who the fuck said it was? (Oh, and the phrase is spelled en masse — it’s French.)
Sorry, I didn’t know.
The topic started with the subject of the assholes who abuse people on twitter and twitter’s management failing to protect their users. Basically instantly people started talking about twitter in ways that make it clear they mean the normal userbase and what they use twitter to say (“trivial”, “hyperbolic trash” – unless harassment is “trivial” that sounds like a description of normal users rather than trolls). For all I know I’m way off base here.
So in other words, if there’s a market failure, we should all just have faith that the market will stop failing.
Well, no, what I would say is if there is a market failure, your choices are: 1) live with it; 2) complain ineffectively; 3) complain effectively (e.g. organize large periodic 1 day boycotts); 4) use an alternative (e.g. tumblr as per tigtog #38); 5) create an alternative; 6) just leave (and let the harassers win).
If every feminist boycotted twitter (say by switching to tumblr), either continuously, or just on Wednesdays, that would get mgmt’s attention.
At the end of my last post I wrote:
The twits apparently think a well-enforced, strong anti-harassment policy will cost them. It is up to the victims and their sympathizers to show them that its absence will cost them more. That’s the only way I think victims will get results.
I should have said it’s the fastest, not the only way. My mistake.
It isn’t that I loathe regulation, but I fear in the current political environment regulations will be much harder to get passed, than taking group action to pressure twitter mgmt to fix the problem.
I use Twitter to read interesting information from people I don’t know.
Unfortunately, Facebook is full of useless information from people I do know.
Anyone who thinks Tumblr does significantly better either doesn’t use it much or stays well away from the social justice side. What Tumblr has going for it is an established SJ community committed to taking on the trolls. They’re not limited to 140 character rebuttals, and it’s those rebuttals that get picked up, added to, and spread, rather than the troll droppings sans commentary.
But you still get things like racist porn blogs harassing women of color who objected to having their selfies used as spank material. Reporting those blogs occasionally works to get them taken down, but they can and do just remake them immediately.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
DimeSpin (#52)
Nah, you’re fine. Raging Bee is busy building strawmen tonight and being an ass about it, which is why you ended up talking past one another a bit. But you made good points.
Raging Bee
1. This misses the point completely. The point of teh analogy was that instead of <talking about the crime,i.e. harassment, people are talking about the looks, i.e. silly content.
2. Why is that wrong? Because it’s fucking victim blaming. If women know that they are more likely to get raped when they’re drunk, why aren’t they staying sober? If you know that a neighbourhood has a high crime rate, why are you still living there? If you know the working conditions at WalMart are shitty, why don’t you get a better job? If Melody Hensley got PTSD from harassment on social media, why isn’t she just staying away from social media?
3. Of course this ignores all the points people have made as why they are on Twitter: It has also become a powerful tool through which marginalized people can spread messages quickly and effectively. People don’t just Tweet nonsense in 140 characters like Dawkins does, but tweet links to articles etc. It’s become one of my major sources of information.
There are whole campaigns that wouldn’t exist without Twitter, like #Aufschrei in Germany, #bringbackourgirls, #everydaysexism etc.
I think incompetence might be being conflated with indifference here. If Twitter management believes it can keep bamboozling people with a reasonable TOS, but not actually do the work and possible loss of membership involved in enforcing it, why – from their perspective – should they bother?
I’m asking seriously here.
If (and this may be a big if, I dunno) the option to abandon Twitter is seen as cowardice by one side, and by victim-blaming on the other, thus preventing mass quitting, why should Twitter bother?
To put it another way, if the TOS had said something along the lines of “We don’t care what anyone says to you, they are free to insult and harass you in any way they choose and we have no intention of reacting to your desire to remain un-harassed,” would anyone here have signed up?
Now that we know that that is their de facto stance, is that better or worse?
Why is that wrong? Because it’s fucking victim blaming.
Bullshit. How is it “victim-blaming” to question the usefulness of a medium or a service?