There’s a lot of research out there, some of it aggregate (anywhere on the Internet) and some of specific (on a given social network) that looks at the extent of harassment.
Harassment isn’t an issue that affects a minority of people. It is more sustained, severe, and worse for the usual groups that experience harassment in person, too: women, people of color, LGBTQA, and all intersections in between.
Reductionism isn’t an argument. I do have concerns that Twitter’s policies might go too far. But given they’ve done nearly nothing so far, why would minor changes designed to approach very specific cases lead to “Twitter is abolishing the ability to speak freely.”
I am willing to lose the freedom of speech within this platform in order to fix this problem. I value not being spammed with rape threats more than I value my ability to say rape threats.
I used to be on the “more freedom” side. The “I’ll defend your right to say it” side. Then I saw that they weren’t saying it, these trolls were using automated spambots to shout it, over and over, at a volume that sweeps aside the ability to say anything else.
Nope. I’ll take the hit to my freedoms.Go say it on the streets, go say it on app.net. I’m not participating in a platform that abuses me.
Oh, and the “law enforcement” argument. Listen to what victims of this abuse say about law enforcement. Don’t rely on your beliefs, or your best guesses. Or mine. We don’t have to guess. We have data.
They uniformly say that law enforcement simply doesn’t understand this at all. They are spending their days explaining this over and over to people that don’t have email addresses. Law enforcement doesn’t get this at all, and wouldn’t have the tools to fix it if they did.
Interesting read. That looks on par with what’s happening out in the “real world”. It’s at least comparable to the numbers I’ve seen on workplace harassment in Belgium. Interestingly that study also shows that half of the people who are harassed know the perpetrator which is in stark contrast to the image of on-line harassment as mostly drive-by harassment by strangers.
I don’t think algorithmically determining wether or not messages get to go through is minor. That disempowers both the sender and the receiver and creates precedent for Twitter determining what you get to see instead of the user (à la Facebook.)
I know the police have a bad reputation in the US, especially lately in light of all the incidents but in most reports I’ve seen from people like Anita Sarkesian, Brianna Wu etc. seemed to be thankful for the police/FBI handling of the threats against them. If there is any serious imminent physical threat they have to be involved anyway. I find the easy dismissal of the idea quite cynical.
It may be worth it. The problem being that you won’t know until after those freedoms are gone.
OK let’s do that : “It’s time for the FBI to prosecute Gamergate trollies” - Brianna Wu.
Law enforcement may not be completely up to the task but if that’s true wouldn’t efforts be better spent trying to make a difference there, with a group that at least should be accountable to the people, rather than lobbying a corporation for these nebulous tools that you know they’ll eventually use to block bad PR for their advertisers ? Seems to me like the first step would be to involve them to give the issue more visibility.
Twitter’s value lies in letting more people post, not fewer. They’re going to err on the commercial side of views and engagement, which is why it’s taken so long to get to this point. I don’t think Twitter represents a public forum that requires the full constitutional protection of the first amendment, because the government doesn’t control, mediate, or throttle it. (In some countries, like Turkey, that’s in huge dispute right now.)
I don’t think we’ll lose the freedom to speak freely on Twitter. I think the ability to talk in a harassing fashion will be curtailed, and Twitter may turn the dial down so hard on that, that it eliminates offensive but “safe” punching up criticism of people in power. But I still think there’s an often strong line between harassment/threat and things that a lot of people don’t want to hear.
Making a racist statement that’s not directed may be intolerably offensive, and Twitter should allow it. Calling someone out with a racial epithet may cross the line. Telling someone you’re going to harm them because they’re a [fill in the blank] is way over. Right? Wrong?
Guilty. Now I’ve come clean about that you can safely disregard my opinions based on my race, gender and/or sexuality if you wish.
Yeah your country is fucked up. When you get around to fixing it, start with the police.
I’m sorry that happened to you, no one deserve that.
I disagree, they are papering over the problem by segregating people. Everyone in their little corner may look good short term but long term I don’t think this actually solves the underlying issues and the lack of communication between groups may actually exacerbate them.
In fact no I’ve never even heard of the guy, I’ll check him out (he has 3 followers I know, not that impressive.)
Sorry I missed it. Still as I’ve said elsewhere I think if nothing else fixing law enforcement is more sustainable solution than relying on corporate beneficence. I respect the fact that your experience has led you to a different view.
I refer to things like this that show how groups are mostly already separated with communication already only going on on the edges. Now if an algorithm decides none of those groups actually really want to see tweets from the other because it may lead to harassment in some cases we’ve essentially separated them, they could remain blissfully unaware of each others existence each in their corner of Twitter. I don’t believe that’s beneficial for either group. Again, opinions will differ on wether the potential cost is worth the benefit. I am just one vote.
So you’re basically saying you don’t think it’s beneficial for women to avoid people who state rape should be legal, spread revenge porn,molest children, make videos to harass disabled teenagers, and have attempted murder serveral times.
You think it’s BAD that they avoid those people.
Amazing.
And no, this isn’t just about an algorithm, because you’ve previous argued it’s oh so terrible to have blocklsits to keep away people who follow those who post revenge porn or doxxes.
A lot of people just want to be left the hell alone from nasty, violent jerks. Why is that such a bad thing?
No, I think the tools put in place to avoid those people could have the unintended consequence of shutting people off from a part of the world. Like a gated community may keep out some criminal element, but may also keep out minorities or another social class.
I do not argue those people you mention aren’t bad people and they don’t deserve to be blocked (they emphatically are and do) rather that others will be caught in that net also.
You’re extrapolating beyond what a) Twitter is stating they will do b) what people are seeing Twitter already doing in testing.
And again conflating the freedom to speak with the freedom to talk at people. The whole point of these changes is for people who do not want kinds of speech to be aggressively assaulted via words.
Please do speculate (as I do) that Twitter might go beyond this. But if you’re alleging this is what they’re proposing, you’re factually in error. And it doesn’t conform to Twitter’s business model, which is maximizing interaction and engagement to be able to show more ads to people.
Historically corporation are not known for their restraint once they have new controls. Thinking of Facebook and Google particularly. I would be very happy to be proven wrong.
I’ll take your word for it. But your description of it in the article does not sound encouraging to me.
The less control they have the less likely they are to pull a Disney or even an Apple. After all when Coca Cola comes knocking to say they want a cleaner Twitter (you know, no nazi propaganda in their stream and stuff) it’ll be mighty tempting to “tweak” things.
The less control they have the less likely they are to pull a Disney or even an Apple. After all when Coca Cola comes knocking to say they want a cleaner Twitter (you know, no nazi propaganda3 in their stream and stuff) it’ll be mighty tempting to “tweak” things
I do not think you have a particularly strong or complete understanding of the whole Coke and Nazi Hashtag take-over…
Yet Twitter is a commercial space, not a government-controlled forum. And Twitter’s rules typically relate to interpersonal interaction, not the kind of speech. One may say all sorts of things that others find offensive, but as long as they aren’t targeted to an individual or specifically defined group and include statements designed to cow or coerce—or, worse, a preview of an actual plan of violence—Twitter won’t remove those.
