Twitter’s Policy Reboot: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
eff.org
eff.org
For example, I've seen a few people get banned or suspended because they said something that made a popular user (or in some cases, one a Twitter member of staff agrees with) uncomfortable, whereas someone who supports said staff member's political views or has more followers can get away with murder.
For example, there have been people who said something loosely associated with GamerGate who got suspended until they removed the tweet, whereas certain journalists and media figures could try and falsely accuse their enemies of serious crimes and get in no trouble whatsoever. It was also a certain Twitter employee who got Milo unverified for ridiculous reasons.
Twitter's policy reboot is already worrying, but what it really needs to do is be even handed with its punishments towards those that break the rule. It shouldn't matter if you're a nobody or a celebrity with millions of followers; break the rules, get suspended or banned. It shouldn't matter if your political views align with Twitter staff or not. Same deal.
Twitter needs to examine what it's policy on freedom of speech and stuff is, but then also enforce it equally, however unpopular that may be.
Ironically they're also blocking #twittercensorship. You can see for yourself here: https://twitter.com/search-home
As far as I know this change wasn't announced (seems to have rolled out over the weekend in response to the Milo incident). It does not bode well for freedom of speech on Twitter.
Edit: to clarify the results are still there if you manually do the search, but the hashtags are no longer in the search suggestions.
http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/01/09/twitters-new-policy-mi...
Seems pretty straightforward if you believe the claim that the abuse complaints are coordinated, even if they're "legitimate". Both pro-Ukraine and pro-Soviet users are violating the new rules, but people are systematically seeking out and reporting violations on pro-Ukraine twitter accounts and the same isn't happening to pro-Soviet accounts.
It is doubtful that they can survive without sacrificing at least one.
Is there a way that Twitter can prevent users from creating another Twitter account to continue to send threats and horrible messages?
The worst messages we see on Twitter always seem to be from new accounts with 3 followers, clearly throwaway accounts. Ban one, they start another.
One approach would be to expand their verified user program to people like me (ie the proletariat) and then have an option to switch the blacklist model of blocking people to a whitelist model of showing only tweets from verified users.
Or they could make a whitelist based on people I follow or that friends follow (or friends-of-friends etc...).
Or maybe just get serious with analytics and sentiment analysis and don't show me stuff that is likely a troll.
But that's exactly how it is now.
I personally like the verified user option but I can understand how some wouldn't for reasons like the one you give. Frankly, I think Twitter's focus on growth is a big part of what got it into this problem in the first place. I'd rather see them focus on quality than growth and I think expanding the verified user program does that.
The measure-of-connectedness option is a little gentler and would probably fix a pretty big piece of the problem.
Quality of what? Discourse? Network connectedness? Ad-accuracy? (I'm nitpicking, but I'm curious what you mean.)
So the logical next question is how does Twitter shape how it is used? I think the answer to that is in part, let other people take care of that. In some ways, Twitter-the-platform is much more interesting that Twitter-the-product. My current favorite example is Nuzzle.
Unfortunately, Twitter is a $13 billion (and falling!) company. Investors think Twitter is Facebook Jr. and it really isn't.
- ban the email address associated with an account from creating other accounts, or in the softer form make someone blocking a user on Twitter block every address using that address. This would run into problems with things like + aliases and people running custom domains who have an effectively unlimited number of addresses, all of which can be reduced but not eliminated if you invest time in it.
- require every account to be linked to a cell phone number using SMS (“mandatory two-factor for everyone!”). This would be more effective than emails but would cost some users real money, screw or delay others if they have unreliable cell carriers, and completely block anyone who doesn't have a cell phone.
- require every account to be verified using a credit card, blocking anyone without a card and no doubt discouraging others. This works great for metafilter.com but there's also a reason why MetaFilter is a site loved by thousands of users rather than millions.
The problem is that Twitter was a VC-funded company which had a big IPO based on highly optimistic growth estimates and their corporate thinking appears to be focused on maintaining those unsustainable numbers. Anything which slows people creating accounts goes directly against the goal of having ever-larger numbers to report.
They currently do this to "problem accounts". I have no interest in giving Twitter my phone number and would ideally like to not even have a phone number in the next few years.
You'd probably need some sort of hybrid approach to do this for real – SMS validation counts as x points, y months of interaction with other users without a complaint counts as z points, etc. It's similar to the email anti-spam measures but a less daunting problem since they don't interoperate with many thousands of other peers (for better and for worse).
I'm also a fan of the "reddit gold" style idea of cheap paid accounts that don't necessarily have to be paid by the account holder. That would make it easy to allow people to filter out unpaid unknown accounts and raise the cost of abuse.
The underlying problem is that comment moderation is a kind of emotional labour that can be fairly gruelling at times, and it needs suitably paid staff to do. Attempts at automatically dealing with it are very much like the early days of spam fighting: not very accurate and constantly shifting. But whereas spam is broadcast, abuse is targeted.
Get a blue tick :)
I have the worst source (I think I heard it on a podcast...) but I'm pretty sure that verified Twitter accounts get an extra notification option to prevent notifications or messages from non-verified users from appearing. It basically turns Twitter into a verified-users-only service where you never see the regular plebs.
If a new account joins and immediately starts expressing strong opinions on, say, a certain Breitbart reporter and how much ethics is in his journalism, whatever those opinions are, those don't need to be sent as notifications or show up as a reply to other tweets. It's not like Twitter guarantees reliable delivery, anyway. If they've been around on Twitter for a bit, sure.
But it's not as clearly in the interest of profit as identifying advertising interests (or even identifying spammers).
The key might be the verb "see". If a troll trolls in the forest and no one sees it, did it actually troll?
This eliminates trustworthy delivery and predictability, you'll have to send tweets and just kinda hope they appear rather than expecting them to always appear, but it might be worth it. Or make it optional.
The idea of "flamebait" has also completely disappeared, and we've lost the ability to roll our eyes at it.
Sorry, but it's not all ridiculous, overblown stupidity anymore. Some of these people seem stupid enough to actually follow through on their threats.
I'm not denying that the scale of the problem has grown to the point that rare events (someone following through on Internet bluster, in this case) will occur. I'm simply remembering a simpler time, when people didn't clamor for the sanitization of their daily Internet lives.
It's also not as if the only two possibilities are “actual stalker attacks you” and “nothing happens”. SWATing, spamming friends/family/coworker with hateful propaganda or photoshopped porn, placing embarrassing ads with the victim's actual contact info, etc. are all things that happen in the real world and don't require some blowhard to leave their house or risk persecution anywhere near as much as a serious physical attack would entail.
I understand the scariness of receiving such a thing, but is there any evidence to suggest that the person willing to act on such a threat is influenced by (1) inability to send or (2) confirmation of receipt (or lack thereof)?
Separate from that question, how and why is it better than the intended recipient knowing credible threats have been made on their life? When is denying them the agency to decide how to respond to the threats acceptable? Does it accomplish anything but alleviating the mental turmoil associated with understanding the realities of their own life?
Verified was originally sold as twitter saying the account belonged to a verified person or business. We could trust it was that person or organization and not some fake account.
This isn't true anymore and they should rename it to something else. The other part is that their are apparently some advertising requirements associated with verified for businesses.
Conversely, the person whose previously doxxed him - also violating the Twitter ToS - should be punished too.
Twitter just need to have a concrete set of rules (objective not subjective) and enforce it consistently regardless of politics or celebrity status.
Apparently that tweet was a joke to a friend (another conservative commentator).
Which just illustrates the problem: it's really really hard to regulate speech fairly
If he broke their TOS he should be banned. Verification is saying "This person is the person they claim to be." Removing the verification is stupid and petty. Milo didn't stop being Milo.
http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Garbage-Sarah-Jeong-ebook/dp/...
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Sarah_Jeong_The_... (DRM-free)
edit: (and remain secure)
It sounds more to me like even after getting banned, the minority of trolls can just make new accounts and resume their harassment, so the solution here isn't human intervention but a technical solution to disincentivize trolls from making new accounts.
The Bank of England phased out their £5 notes. English bank notes have portraits of famous people on them. The old note had a woman, the new note had a man. That meant that all English bank notes had portraits of men; there were no women on the notes.
Caroline Criado Perez the Bank of England to reconsider this decision, and asked for a woman to appear on at least one of the notes.
For that she was bombarded with messages. One man was sending about 50 an hour, for about 12 hours, across multiple accounts.
Other people sent fewer tweets, but those tweets were far more menacing.
Here's what the judge said about 2 people who sent threats of rape and murder:
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Document...
> Here there were a series of communications (not just a single one as referred to in the guideline) where extreme language was used and substantial fear was caused.
> Indeed it is hard to imagine more extreme threats (death, rape, and worse [Sorley]) and rape [Nimmo]. The harm is, and (despite what is said on your behalf) must have been intended to be, very high.
> The fact that they were anonymous heightened the fear. The victims had no way of knowing how dangerous the people making the threats were, whether they had just come out of prison, or how to recognise and avoid them if they came across them in public.
And about blocking:
> The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned
Services all the time like email have to work to combat spam, this is no different.
See this thread:
https://twitter.com/terraloire/status/686591765931921409
With the internet being as central to modern society as it is, instead of simply some USENET servers used by some college kids and bored sysadmins, there isn't really a distinction between "threats on the internet" and "threats" any more. (This is not to say that there's no longer a distinction between "idle threats" and "serious threats", of course, just that whether they're on the internet is not a determiner of them being idle.)
> (and if they aren't - what kind of stuff are you spewing out that makes so many people waste their time getting angry with you?)
"Normal" people get angry when they feel threatened. If you are challenging the status quo, it's not unusual for people who benefit from the status quo to get angry at you. This has been true for all of history, and arguing that you shouldn't upset the supporters of the status quo is quite literally arguing that Twitter should not be a platform for free speech.
It honestly sounds to me like you're approaching this from first principles / intuition, instead of any data (or analyses of data, which exist) about how internet harassment actually works.
The biggest thing that changed is instead of using anonymous handles, people got into the habit of using their personal information. From the link you included, that woman has what I assume is her name, her photo, her city, and her personal website - most of which is likely a gateway for googling more information. On her actual profile, her latest retweet is millennials mansplaining or something, one could say she's basically baiting a group of people she disagrees with, and further down she's calling Ricky Gervais a "whiny baby" (where does that fit under twitters rules?)
If I was spewing that kind of crap about people with my own name beside it, I guess I'd be worried about people finding where I live and harassing me too. It's mind boggling why people do this to themselves.
> It honestly sounds to me like you're approaching this from first principles / intuition, instead of any data (or analyses of data, which exist) about how internet harassment actually works.
It's why I asked. Maybe it's just that I think of the internet the same way I did 15 years ago where nobody online ever needs to know your name, age, sex, height, opinions, political affiliations, favorite food, etc unless you make it so, and when you want to start over with a clean slate, you can just remake internet accounts rather than having some dumb crap you said 10 years ago stick with you forever on google.
If we genuinely want harassment to stop, the very minimum that's necessary is for all people to be treated equally under the anti-harassment policies. Otherwise, why would those who are defined as valid targets have any investment in the smooth running of our systems? We'll create a permanent enemy and never have a day's peace until the end of time.
You're probably not a woman in the tech field on the internet, then.
"and if they aren't - what kind of stuff are you spewing out that makes so many people waste their time getting angry with you?"
Stuff like women should simply be treated equally.
Can you be sure? You may have just invalidated my own experiences as a woman. Am I obligated to now tell you my gender so you know for sure if you're being misogynist or not? But I guess its okay because I'm an anonymous stranger on the internet and you didn't know I was a woman to give me special treatment? It's a lot to think about.
> Stuff like women should simply be treated equally.
Yes. Women are "stuff".