Quite right, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that other random people can drag you into a soul-sucking conversation with a simple @mention. I’m not sure you need to go so far as to having verified accounts, but you certainly can set up settings so you don’t even see this mess or interact with them unless you want to. Perhaps a personal setting that lets you choose from the following:
Let everyone interact with you
Let followers interact with you
Let people you follow interact with you
Or any other typical black/whitelist you would expect.
Twitter started by using SMS as a feature to receive and generate tweets. Why don’t they just require users to provide a cell phone number as a level of entry in addition to email?
It Also that occurs to me that twitter is really one of the rare places where polite people interact with the hateful scum of the world. We keep talking about how to drive such people from twitter, online gaming and Youtube comments, but maybe we need to focus more on a movement to stamp out being a stupid asshole in the same way we addressed smoking or workplace sexual harassment.
It’s such a peculiar story. The heart of humans — what lies inside? For someone to pursue a decade of harassment and nearly drive people to die, and then to write prose that people love and to interact in what seems to be an empathetic way?
I like all these ideas as far as they go, but there has to be some more sophisticated web-of-trustiness analysis that could be performed. Come up with some sort of aggregate score. Possible metrics to look at:
Maybe extend the graph analysis out one more level (to followers of followers)
Not on a list of high-abuse IPs
Not created from behind an anonymizing network
Then, I dunno, maybe PageRank the whole thing.
No one of these should be make-or-break, and individually most of them can be gamed. By default, the score does nothing. Unless the person you’re messaging has their minimum acceptable score set above zero.
Why can’t something like this be done as a third-party service? You sign up for the service, let it monitor your @reply activity, and when it detects that you got hit by someone fishy, it mutes the sum-bich. The service would save the identities and the @reply tweets so you could look them over, and give you a report of why it dropped the banhammer. In case you care enough to find out what you’re missing.
My guess? Partly because there are some legitimate reasons for not having a cell phone. Partly because it’s in Twitter’s interests to have as big and active a user base as possible. And trolls generate activity.
There was a game forum I used to visit years ago that used an interesting mechanism to fight trolls: a moderator could flag them as invisible. They could post, but no one else could see their posts. To the troll, everything looked normal, but to everyone else it was like a global ignore flag.
Here’s my take. A lot of the problem does stem from the “John Gabriel Theory of Internet Fuckwads”, that is, Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience => Total Fuckwad. But so many of these serial abusers also have “real” accounts. So why shouldn’t twitter demask them?
How much twitter abuse would be solved if, for clearly abusive accounts, Twitter would reveal to the abusee the abusive account’s IP login history, the email address used to register the account, and all other twitter accounts which used those same IPs in a +/- 48 hour range? [1]
Yes, you could still have an anonymous abusive sock-puppet account, but it would take work, and most of the run of the mill douchebags would find themselves outed, humiliated, and run off the Twitterspace.
[1] You exempt carrier-grade NATs or similar by simply recognizing them as IPs with lots and lots of different simultaneous logins.
Yes, I like this idea. If a Twitterer (Twit?) gets itself on the radar as an abusive account, instead of banning them, they are just tagged as “invisible”. So they can keeping spewing hate with all the @names they want, but no one other than them is going to see it.
They will either carry on their merry crusade of persecution, ignorant of the fact they are screaming to themselves or they might catch on and then go into new account creation.
At the least this kind of process would prevent the trolls from feeding off each other while including an innocent victim’s @name and make the cycle of account creation longer.
Be very careful about the definition of “abuse”. Roca Labs and their ilk could use this measure to unmask critics.
Any measure taken here can backfire if not crafted very very carefully. There will be errors and there are players that will be exploiting the defense measures themselves.
The sad truth is that if it’s actually successful, the best fate one can hope for is that twitter steals all the good ideas and incorporates it into the client. Adding useful system extensions is a thankless, but valuable, task
Twitter shouldn’t reveal anything publicly for that reason. But they can be more clear about what methods they’d take as their own legal recourse.
And if they require more identifying information from users, then if there are lawsuits or criminal charges against attackers, those people are more readily found.
And in abusive regimes the critics and dissenters are also more readily found. If the corporation has the data, it will cough up the data given sufficient incentives.
I personally wouldn’t use a service that requires me to provide a cell phone number, for two reasons: 1) they generally collect too much information about us already and share it to dubious purposes, I’m not giving them any information they don’t absolutely need to have. It’s not voting or buying a weapon or anything, it’s a (rather limited, although useful in some contexts) communication platform. 2) I don’t have a cell phone number. Never had the need for one, and in the three months I did temporarily have one (because I needed to get a short plan to buy the phone at a decent price… I use the phone as a mobile computer with wifi), I made less than five calls and received one. I’m not an especially social person EXCEPT through the Internet, and I resent the suggestion that I need to buy in to some kind of plan in order to participate in that.
I do approve of some kind of graduated membership, where as you prove you can interact like a civilized person you get access to more and more people.
In the architectures of communication we also keep forgetting that not every actor there is a person. Twitter is often used as a medium for sending/receiving data in machine2machine and human2machine communication, and there are various twitter bots.
There’s a good reason people use anonymous and/or burner accounts. I’m a recent (re)convert to pseudonymous burner accounts myself. When I started using the internet they were de rigueur but in recent years I decided to use my real name and stick with it, after all it lends a certain credibility to posts and after all why should I be ashamed of my opinions ? So of course when I signed up to twitter I used my real name, or as close as I could get to it having a reasonably common name in my part of the world. Then one day I got in a political discussion with mr Fleishman. Nothing serious but my browser at work malfunctioned and by reloading I ended up spamming him with the same picture several times, so he blocked me (quite rightly too, no time for idiots.) I tried apologising through app.net but no reply. “Ah well,” I thought “that’s a pity.” and let it go. Fast forward to a month ago when I notice some people block me all of a sudden. I do some digging and find out that in September I got put on a shared blocklist by Chris Grant, a guy I didn’t know and hadn’t contacted, associated with GamerGate, which at the time the list was published I had not even heard of. (Grant later admitted the list caught a lot of randoms who shouldn’t have been on there.) This was hot on the heels of mr Fleishman reviewing “collaborative blocking” on this very site. So now not only is my real name associated with a bunch of sociopaths I do not support but I’m blocked by several people whose stuff I like and respect with no indication of how this will propagate going forward.
Lesson learned: burner accounts for everything again going forward. This is one thing GamerGaters got right. Got something even mildly controversial to say, create a new account. Not only will it insulate you from fallout (deserved or not) but it’s the only way to guarantee you’re actually heard. Otherwise people with big networks will just shut you down, intentionally or not. It’s happening now and will only grow worse going forward, especially if something like BlockTogether becomes as popular as say Adblock on the browser. Twitter will be reduced to a heavily moderated private chatroom and why reinvent those when they already exist ?
