Nice Oscars commercial, Twitter -- now how about doing something about misogyny on your platform?

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/nice-oscars-commercial-twitte.html

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What do you suggest, Mark?

It seems to me that any idiot can post hate to twitter faster than it can be detected and taken down. You just drive from hot spot to hot spot, making new accounts and posting your hate. It’s trivial.

When I wanted to stop people from posting hate directed at my daughter, I went to the house of the person most responsible and knocked on the door.

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You know, no one HAS to use Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can easily avoid using that which offends thee.

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So Twitter can’t say that they stand with women because there are issues with the platform? Definitely there’s a ton more they can be doing, absolutely, but flaming them for it seems counterproductive. Sure call them out and ask for action but moderating online spaces is not easy. Show me a public forum the size of Twitter that doesn’t have problems and i’ll show you a world that doesn’t exist.

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Until Twitter is willing to spend money on the problem (ie reduce profits) nothing will really change. It will remain a toxic place, which is a shame.

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At this point there’s only one real fix for Twitter.

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I wouldn’t be sad if it disappeared but then the trolls have to go somewhere, and the thought of that terrifies me more.

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So when will you be getting out of jail for that assault conviction?

You’re assuming they caught him…

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You can throw all the money in the world at that problem and it won’t ever go away. Unfortunately toxicity and hate speech will always have avenues open to them. The difference with twitter is that it specifically became a ligitimized avenue when this country elected on if the most toxic/abusive twitter users as president.

Fair point! though, I was more being snarky to the point that craptastic words on a screen in social media isn’t really a valid defense for assaulting someone. And I do not hope it came to that.

In all honesty…block/mute/report and move on is the only thing you can truly do.

Naw, I just had a nice discussion with the young man’s father, and the problem went away. There’s a thread about it on BBS somewhere.

Although, I recently found out that a few months after that incident the young man talked tough to the “school resource officer” (A.K.A. cop) and got tased pretty hard.

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Maybe we could B-ark them and reopen Twitter with better ToS a few weeks later?

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Trolling is too easy on twitter. Algorithmic input is required. Overused buzz words would have a five second delay before appearing on the screen and cut and paste would be locked out.

Twitter couldn’t moderate itself out of a paper bag even if it was willing to spend the money on human moderators and an effective flagging system to support them (which its shareholders would not allow).

They already come here from Facebook, especially when a Russia-related BB story triggers an alert in St Petersburg. But yes, most of the non-professional trollies and assorted morons with low standards tend to stick around the toxic-by-design environs of Facebook and Twitter.

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Here’s a link to the commercial (as it seemed to be broken in the OP):

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Yeah. Nothing was done about the Twitter bullying that drove August Ames to kill herself. Not a damn thing.

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Posting on Twitter that Twitter sucks and fosters abuse (both true statements) seems odd. I don’t use Twitter myself, so perhaps this is a stupid suggestion, but here goes…

As far as I can see the only content on Twitter comes from users. What would happen if people who don’t support the vile status quo stopped posting for, say, a week? Let it turn into Gab, and let the investors who are propping it up start to get worried about its future.

Then I’m not going to tell you about this little thing called 4chan…

Whoops!

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There is a alternative, Mastodon. It solves the scale issues by making it a federated service, everyone can host their own server, kind-of like email. Every server admin can do the policing for their own server so that keeps it more manageable.

New sign-ups can be limited or disabled per server. Servers can block entire other servers if the aggregated abuse coming from them is big enough. If you don’t like the policing policies of the server you’re on you can switch to one that is more, or less, strict.

It is a relatively small community now but it is steadily growing. At the moment it is very much a place of refuge for people who really can’t stand Twitter anymore, so there is a really high level of LGTBQ+, leftist, anarchist, sjw snowflakes. It’s really welcoming, especially compared to Twitter.

I encourage every complaining Twitter user to create a account and check it out for a bit. If you don’t get it immediately that’s alright, just check back in a bit later and give it another try.