I’m going to suggest you’re an outlier who may be engaged in more inflammatory speech than you.
It was new and people still actually used it, so I figured it was worth a shot. Turns out cold emailing people and asking them to unblock you isn’t very successful. Turns out. As I recently had experience confirming. Still tried but hey when you get lumped in with a bunch of awful people why should anyone even read that email?
I can be an ass, but I’m not a harasser nor someone who makes threats or condones that behaviour. I have opinions and am not shy about expressing them, some of them liberal some of them conservative. I also shut up when asked to, no point trying to argue with someone who doesn’t want to have a discussion. Maybe that makes me an outlier maybe not, it certainly will if twitter turns into a bunch of private rooms. That is any more than is already the case now.
Well, it does suck you’re being swept into nets not intended for you. I know this is the case with some of the GG neutral people who are following key accounts to see what they’re saying, and thus meet the heuristic without the intent. (This is why lists are good instead of follows.)
I don’t want Twitter to be sanitized; just remove the asymmetric power of harassers. Symmetric power is something we have to cope with!
All we have to do is to solve the problem the internet has wrestled with since its inception and wasn’t set up to cope with ? Well that should be easy. I feel like I should post one of those old “solution to spam” forms from Slashdot here.
People keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. The only solutions we have found that actually work are a) everything goes and you deal with it (and let law enforcement deal with the really scary people) and b) small heavily moderated forums. Everything in between breaks down. Twitter was conceived as the former and now people will, maybe inadvertently, try to turn it into the latter. That’s not to say people shouldn’t speculate on how to make things better and I certainly empathise with the truly frightening things some people are going through out there.
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Reductionism is not very interesting. I’ve carved out a very specific space; shown that some solutions are effective; and brought in feedback and insight from other people.
Your response is, “everything on the Internet is the same and nothing works.”
Done discussing! Thanks!
The very asymmetry of the interaction becomes important in different contexts. Yes, the asymmetrical trollies are a pain. But the asymmetrical power of dissidents is also a pain to those who want to stamp out them and their followers.
The real challenge is how to address the trollies without also giving other powerful opponents tools to deal with their critics.
With the resources running out and the West losing the remains of democracy, who knows when we will need that sort of asymmetrical power ourselves.
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[quote=“GlennF, post:48, topic:46142”]Your response is, “everything on the Internet is the same and nothing works.”
[/quote]
That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I said was that if you know the history of the internet all these things have been tried before and have failed leaving only 2 models in place. Twitter is far from unique it’s just the last in a long line of online discussion tools. What you are suggesting is just another variant on the “real name policy” that has been tried and failed for both Google and Facebook among others. The evolutionary pressures on the internet have killed of many, many thousands of attempts like this and left us only with what works. Study history or be doomed to repeat it.
[quote=“GlennF, post:48, topic:46142”]
Reductionism is not very interesting. I’ve carved out a very specific space; shown that some solutions are effective; and brought in feedback and insight from other people. [/quote]
Reductionism ? You have the liberty of writing an article, I’m here writing short comments into a box trying to keep the wall of text to a minimum so people will actually bother to read it.
Where have you shown these effective solutions ? You mention Facebook’s vetting of accounts, which is laughable to anyone who has ever participated in a discussion on a Facebook comment section. My local newspapers’ comments on some articles are filled to overflowing with all kinds of threats and inappropriate comments. The few times I have “reported” I get a reply maybe a month later, never have I seen a suspension. This “solution” simply does not scale. What Facebook does excel at is creating a semi-private space for small groups of like minded people. This is almost the polar opposite of Twitter though.
You speculate that tying reputation to a handle would work. Not only have I a shown above that already over eager use of these tactics will drive people, like myself, in the opposite direction but this is simply yet another reinvention of Slashcode. You can visit Slashdot to see how well that works. This is the site that spawned “wonderful” organisations like the GNAA. In the end you create a jumbled mess of moderation and meta-moderation and still are left battling the same problem every day, you browse at +5 and get the bowdlerised discussion or you slum it and show everything to catch the down voted but interesting or anonymous posts along with the dregs.
Finally you link to what amounts to basically heavy policing by Twitter itself with their “secret troll silencing tools.” I don’t know where to start on that one. It’s strange to see corporate policing of a discussion forum described as positive on this of all sites. It’s a pandora’s box that has never led to anything but disneyfication and the eventual death of the platform in favour of more open alternatives.
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This is known as shadowbanning. The site FARK used to use it. (Maybe they still do.)
The problem is that if it’s used against someone who isn’t driving trollies, when that person finds out, it tends to enrage them. So you end up creating trollies, or worse.
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Why is it strange? This site is pretty aggressively moderated. I almost didn’t start posting for exactly that reason.
If I got put on a GamerGate block list I’d list it on my profile as an endorsement.
Heard, maybe. Taken seriously, not so much.
One thing I’ve observed in decades of forum use, starting with BBSs and Usenet, is that the person posting is a very good predictor of the quality of the content. If you post a comment via an anonymous burner account, you basically throw away your entire reputation. As you’ll notice, the kind of person who feels the need to do that is not generally one prone to making insightful comments and engaging in thoughtful conversations.
What you should probably be doing, in my view, is learning the skills necessary to make your controversial points in a way which won’t piss people off and make it look like you’re an asshole. Of course, this can be tough, depending on what those views actually are. There are some topics which cannot be discussed reasonably in public without people getting really upset, no matter how hard you try, but it’s a pretty small list.
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Definition of reductionism. Then you misrepresent and conflate a bunch of stuff that isn’t the same. So. Not interested in further engagement since you won’t apply rigor to your expression.
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True but I think the mods/posters here would see what they do as different from a major corporation doing the same. After all this is a private(-ish) forum while something like twitter has pretensions of being a net-wide standard. BoingBoing comes out pretty strongly against ISP filtering for example, I’d see Twitter aggressively cleansing itself as more part of that side.
Lol, I couldn’t care less about those guys but like I said that list got around and now I find myself being blocked by others unrelated that that particular poopstorm. Like a particular web cartoonist I used to follow. Now that’s annoying.
Also true but if you do have a point you can make it and if it’s good it will stand on its own merit. When I used to frequent Slashdot often some of the more interesting posts were made by “anonymous coward.”
I don’t know if that can be done on Twitter. It has no room for all the niceties people use and hedging they do in conversation. It all has to be short, pithy and completely devoid of nuance. Add that to a situation were people more and more are already entrenched and not willing to listen to other arguments and you just get a recipe for endless flamewars.
I have gotten better at just skipping over conversations, not engaging. Not sure if I really think that’s progress though, I don’t think the internet should be a spectator sport.
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In some cases/contexts you’re right. In others, not so.
Consider the cases when the commenter has something to say but does not want to bother with creating an account.
Consider also the cases of controversial topics, when posting a certain kind of opinion/fact may tarnish your career prospects (e.g. sexual or political topics, or talking against the Powers That Be, whoever wherever it is). Using a persistent, trackable and easily-ish identifiable nym is generally not a good idea; using a preexisting nym with existing reputation (or even real-life career/freedom/life) to lose, double so.
Many of the documents that facilitates the founding of the US itself were published anonymously. (Many crackpot screeching pamphlets too, though. But in many cases such categorization is in the eye of the beholder. Or beer holder.)
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Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not a twitter user.
I hear of hundreds of instances of completely unacceptable communications being carried by Twitter - death and rape threats that are legally actionable. Yet, I hear of ZERO instances of people being prosecuted for these crimes.
Sounds exactly like “playing games” to me.
If Twitter merely blocks the accounts, in effect this helps the miscreants escape being traced, because of course they simply move to another access point and open another account. Twitter’s account blocking is enabling because it encourages behavior that helps vermin escape prosecution - they are constantly shifting IPs and ISPs, and none of them are “real” after the first one, they are all “burner” IPs. And it’s obviously a game, of course, just like tag or assassin, to any griefer trolley willing to play. It’s the perfect enjoyable lark for that type of person; it’s the best playing field ever! Drive to McDonalds, get on the free wifi, make an account, and have fun 'til you’re banned. Next stop Starbucks.
There are plenty of forums where your identity is hidden right up until you post something legally actionable, like pedo material or credible threats - at which point the forum owners will do everything in their power to assist the authorities in determining the real identity of the transgressors. Why doesn’t that happen on Twitter? Has even ONE gamergate harasser gone to jail or paid a fine for their crimes? It seems like there should have been hundreds of prosecutions by now if Twitter actually cared about any of this.
Not in the US, perhaps. They’re quite keen on it in the UK (to the point of absurdity).
Edit:
This (old) article gives some numbers:
Figures obtained by The Associated Press through a freedom of information request show a steadily rising tally of prosecutions in Britain for electronic communications — phone calls, emails and social media posts — that are "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character — from 1,263 in 2009 to 1,843 in 2011. The number of convictions grew from 873 in 2009 to 1,286 last year.
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Absolutely right. I consider Twitter completely unsuited to conversations of any kind, let alone controversial ones.
Yeah, me neither. For years I would stop reading sites that had no discussion or feedback mechanism. Even now I find them less engaging. And yet, I also recognize that in recent years, comment sections have become very problematic.
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True. However, I’m not sure that the situation in the 1700s has a lot to teach us about the media situation today. In the 1700s, you had to have significant time and resources at your disposal to get your message sent to thousands of people. That effectively added a certain amount of filtering. Nowadays, you can scream abuse at thousands of people across the world without even getting out of bed. And many do.
I don’t participate in forums that prevent anonymity - I like people to choose how they represent themselves, among other reasons - but I don’t believe that the sacrifice of anonymity is required in order to achieve accountability. That’s a false dichotomy.
Especially since what little anonymity exists is really all between users. Website owners know what your source address was, and ISPs know where that address was physically sourced, and cops are easily able to take it from there to the flesh.
@daneel has pointed out that in Great Britain the authorities are willing to go after Twitterers… twits… tweeters… OK, whatever the users are called, I dunno. The few shreds of anonymity that the Internet provides for people who are not causing harm don’t need to be further weakened in order to prosecute those who do harm.
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No I do not support hellbans.
The other solutions proposed here make a lot more sense, just have a setting where you don’t allow any Twitter accounts at “trust level 0”, as we call it in Discourse, to interact with you.
A trust level 0 Twitter account would be based on the following criteria:
- account created in the last (n) days
- has less than (n) followers (of TL1? TL2? etc)
- has tweeted at least (n) times
- has at least (n) favorites and (n) retweets from other TL1 users
etcetera
Yes, Twitter is a horrific discussion medium.
Anything is better than Twitter for any discussion of any complexity or nuance whatsoever. A N Y T H I N G.
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I’m a moderator for a Team Fortress 2 forum and servers. Its been a while since i’ve had the time to play the game, though i actively moderate the forums. My favorite thing in the world in-game was making players voice and text chat invisible to everyone in the server. I could read/hear them of course and it always made my day seeing them freak out because no one was reacting to their trolling. They would either leave or beg me to make them visible to the server (i never did). Our servers and forums are very civilized and fun, and we attribute it to the simplest of rules: Don’t be a douche. It’s fairly subjective but it’s very generous. Some players are aggressive and can toe the line of trolling at times, but it’s usually fairly clear when someone is being an asshat. Most of the times a warning will suffice, but at that point they get put into a shit list of problem users we keep a close eye on.
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