Progress on addressing online abuse
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
Also I wonder what exactly falls under 'behavior that incites fear about a protected group' and 'repeated and/or or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone'. Will Twitter enforce politically correct tweets? Is NSFW content going to be banned because it offends some people?
I think it's reasonable to ban calls for violence against individuals, but I don't think banning all sorts of hateful content is a good idea and it's not going to help removing it anyway. If people don't want to see certain content, by all means, let them hide it from their feed and notifications.
Blocking, muting and reporting users isn't the answer when you have right in your face a hateful hashtag. You could look for the one who started the trending topic and report it, but with thousands of mentions, you'll have to scroll a lot.
I actually thought this "progress" was about reporting trending topics, or finding the one who started it. And then, once again, we see twitter turning the blind eye.
So, instead of fostering more exchange of ideas and information, we're just going to have a bigger echo chamber to help perpetuate groupthink, misinformation and convenient lies?
I'm not trying to be rude but does no one else see why this is a problem?
There's a reason why celebrities have had the "quality filter" available for ages. A very high volume of tweets makes it more difficult to use twitter to communicate.
Twitter has decided that instead of focusing on showing the world as it develops, instead of closing the digital divide and creating a space for the "new media"...
They want to be a social network. And make money from it. (yeah, right)
I want a better Twitter to exist someday. I might make one myself (and no, GNU Social isn't good enough yet). But that Twitter would have to be focused around things that are happening, around global occurrences and real news. Not some stupid internet catfights that could be solved by turning one's phone off for a day.
Any sort of blocking solution is hard, I think akin to Facebook's "fake news" problem. There's no easy way to determine what news is "fake" or not. But giving people tools that they can use to manage their own space in their own way is an important step forward.
I hope that this will encourage more people to speak out on twitter about injustice and abuse, since it gives them some ability to shield themselves from any backlash.
> for a few years now
Each time I see that option, I think how crazy I could get blacklisting every FB under the sun. It sounds like you've tried!
Online abuse isn't simply seeing 'the nonsense'; online abuse is when people send hateful messages to you in response to what you post. Suggesting people shouldn't post if they don't want to see the abuse you're cutting off their voice, which is not an acceptable solution. People should be able to say things online if they want to. They shouldn't have to see the horrible responses. That's not to say people shouldn't be able to post horrible responses (although there's a strong argument that they shouldn't), just that there needs to be tools to filter what you receive. That's what Twitter is building. It's a good thing.
It's like fighting neighborhood crime by drawing your curtains.
Ignoring/hiding online abuse, is very effective at shutting down the culprits. If no one is effected, they can't do anything.
There needs to be a "quality" score for a Twitter user and an option to mute tweets from "low quality" users. Quality could be determined by utilizing an algorithm similar to Google Page Rank. Retweets, likes, and follows by "quality" users would be considered in a user's quality rank. Reports of hateful conduct would be weighted in as well.
It's too bad that it has taken this long for Twitter to even -start- to address the abuse. They are lucky they have no direct competitors.
I do feel that greater control over "notifications" is the obvious approach here and glad they're introducing controls like 'mute conversation'. Medium has an interesting approach with comments where you can see all comments vs. author-approved comments. Twitter probably doesn't want to make their UI complex with a lot of options but more granular control on replies (maybe even an ability to disable replies and quote tweets) would probably be useful.
There was a Black Mirror episode about this in season 3. Seems it was on point.
Theo de Raadt had a good description of why every hurdle helps, but I can't find it. :(
And it doesn't have to stop at phone, either. You could multiple levels of verification, like Airbnb. Then as a user you could further filter how strict you want your tweet exposure to be.
4chan isn't a bunch of computer illiterate folks, either.
I think it would be valuable to split notifications into two areas. Low and high value notifications. High-value would tend to be stuff associated with accounts you follow, and maybe unfollowed, verified accounts judged as 'high quality'. Everything else - interactions from 'randos' - gets filed as low-value.
Nothing needs to get hidden from users who want to see every time anyone interacts with them.
Low-value notifications simply accumulate in a separate chronological list. There would be a visual signification in the Twitter UI when you have new unseen stuff there.
This will make spam accounts that 'like' random tweets, to get people's attention, less effective.
The downside is it raises a barrier to possibly valuable new connections being made between strangers. But not a hard barrier. It'll take some extra effort for a message-recipient to engage - they need to proactively check their low-value-notifications page.
Twitter would prefer a solution that preserves a high engagement level. So I don't think they'll adopt my great idea.
Should the Twitter app on my device serve me, or Twitter Inc.? This seems like a conflict of interest!
Imagining a superior, more harmonious social networking ecosystem: separation between developers of client interfaces and message-delivering infrastructure. This is the approach Urbit is trying...
Twitter's free, ad-supported model, is not financially successful. It may not survive, whether it's disrupted by an alien computing ecosystem or not. In the course of evolving the microblogging concept, other desirable aspects may die too, like Twitter's monopoly status (and thus its near-universal reach). Maybe we'll end up with hundreds of separate networks, with varying user policies and performance qualities.
To get abusive notifications, doesn't the unfortunate recipient have to follow the abuser first?
Does Twitter really allow anyone to @mention anyone else without the recipients having to confirm it? Or does it in fact notify the recipient with the full text of the comment, so harassers are exploiting the approval mechanism?
If we accept the notion that Twitter resembles a public bulletin board, then unpleasant (and potentially, hate) speech can and will come at anyone, and just like in real life, often the recipient has no methods of recourse other than trying to disregard it -- not making a value judgment whether this is fair, but this is how it actually happens. Blatant threats to life and property can be reported to the authorities, but most real-life verbal harassment cannot be pre-emptively filtered.
On the other hand, if we respect that each user's timeline, notification space, and knowledge graph is controlled by the user, unsolicited, unapproved @mentions are disruptive by nature. But there doesn't seem to be a way in Twitter right now to disable unsolicited @mentions or make them require the mentionee's approval.
So Twitter, by its behavior, seems to take the first stance. Why, then, does any Twitter user have an expectation that abuse targeting them can be limited by the company?
It's great for when you want to talk to celebrities. Unfortunately, oftentimes celebrities don't want to talk to you.
One challenge of this is attempts by groups to harm a user's score by blocking/reporting non-hate/spam. This requires a block or report to be weighted by the blocker/reporter's credibility. It's definitely doable, * Warning Shameless plug* a product I've worked on https://www.inversoft.com/products/profanity-filter handles these situations well. Without some type of credibility tracking it's usually incorrect to blindly trust reports/blocks.
Remember Blizzard Real ID? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/blizzard-scraps-real-id-fo...
> A Blizzard employee going by the handle Bashiok revealed his real name, Micah Whipple, on the forums in the course of the debate. WoW Riot responded by quickly finding and publishing Whipple's address, phone number, age, the names of his family, his Facebook page and lists of his favourite music and movies, to illustrate the privacy and identity theft issues raised by Blizzard's decision.
No thank you. Make your own social network and have it be fully verified if you'd like, but I wouldn't consider joining it for a second.
Referring to this sentence: > Our hateful conduct policy prohibits specific conduct that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.
2. What steps are you taking to address the seeming divide between left/right abuse enforcement? For instance, AssassinateTrump was trending for a time. Will you offer evidence showing that you are banning abusive political speech from the left and right?
Suspending accounts is the dumbest, though—the account of an abuser is likely to be in the block/mute list of hundreds of people. By suspending his account, the user will just create another and continue annoying the very same people that had blocked him already.
I wonder who in Twitter, Inc. uses Twitter at all.
Why can't Twitter do what Metafilter does? $5 to sign up and a 24 hour delay on any posting.
How is it working out for Metafilter?
I don't believe the payment is used towards enforcing identity (MeFi values privacy and anonymity when needed) and locating abusers, but if things got really bad I don't see why that would be a huge problem.
How about a bayesian approach, like email?
Contains masked content +3
New account +4
No profile pic +5
Follows accounts with low reputation +4
Greater than out imaginary threshold of 10 so maybe hide the mention from whoever's timeline?
There are other machine learning approaches that would also learn from data - specifically, a Bayesian approach would use Bayes theorem.
Nothing about my post ever suggested the value was arbitrary. You've just assumed that.
And in any case, a Bayesian approach would require more than a handful of criteria.
No problem, happens to the best of us.
I'm not going to apologize for reading the words you wrote, nor for not being able to read your mind.