Twitter boss 'sorry' to abused women
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
"Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button.
"The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been.
"Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them."
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Two thoughts:
One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic.
Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.
I'm not convinced it would result in wrongly removing a lot of people, since there is some form of karma in the number of followers and the number of lists someone is on.
Of course, it would be nice to have some recourse to an independent appeal if something goes wrong. However, Google manages without one (1), and its decisions can have devastating personal and financial consequences. That's not the case with Twitter, where there is no real barrier to creating accounts. Including spam accounts.
(1) Unless you happen to be buddies with someone at Google.
Mmm, well, there you're changing your argument on me ^_^;
Okay, let's talk about that instead. Problems: False positives, (from whose perspective?) low staff to customer ratio.
Potential solutions:
Recruit volunteer staff
Pros: More staff. Cons: Some of them are going to be evil.
Let users report people they don't want to hear from (as you point out, this is how it will work)
Pros: Reduces staff tasks Cons: Again, might be used for evil
So, essentially what we seem to be looking at with the above problems is a trust issue. If you give people binary access to total power, even on a probabilistic basis as per the report function, then it's going to be abuse.
Potential solutions:
Give people more limited forms of power than banning and not banning.
Pros: - varies Cons: Less deterrents?
How might we do that?
Potential solutions: Let people ban others from their accounts.
Pros: No longer have to worry about people who just don't like someone banning them. Cons: Loses a lot of the social deterrent effect, people who joke about rape probably don't care about continuing to talk to the person they're attacking anyway. Cons: Doesn't let you network with people who are likely to share your values, so you'll get exposed to attacks anyway.
(This seems to be the current state of affairs - I don't really use twitter so I don't know, but suggestions on pages seem to imply it.)
If we solve the second problem there, the first one becomes less of an issue. At this point it starts to look like a networking and evidence problem. If we have ban groups - that you can join or unjoin as you please, to make abuse less likely, and have each individual user's decisions absolutely override any group level decision for their account.
Okay, what are the potential problems with that?
How would you vote?
If someone's banned from one person's account gets banned from all of them, then as the group increases the power of any individual within that group will increase.
Require more than one person to make a decision to get rid of someone?
How do we stop groups of thugs just voting to shut someone up?
Choose a representative sample? Say by forwarding the reported post to three people within the group and having them all sign off on it.
Downside is you duplicate work - upside is you reduce the potential for them all to be evil - and if the group itself is evil then it's not a group that people would want to be part of anyway.
How do you keep trolls out? If the group consistently votes against your reports, then your reports stop being received?
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I don't know, admittedly this isn't my area and this is like ten minutes thought. But it doesn't seem to me like an absolutely unsolvable problem as much as it seems a bit tricky.
A la "Flag for spam" on youtube comments. I would hesitantly estimate that perhaps 1% of comments which appear with a "This has been flagged as spam" warning are actually spam.
The problem would be to find out who is actually registering with real names, but I think Facebook have done this for a while now. It shouldn't be a problem for people that are a bit famous, and with the lopsided amount of people on Twitter that are followed compared to the whole userbase, I guess it might mostly be decently famous people that would have the want or need to register with their real names.
If they want to play that whole culture sensitivity game, they also need to censor all negative statements against religious figures - because there is certainly some nation, somewhere in the world, which has laws against that.
It seems to me absolutely unacceptable why Twitter is bowing to free-speech censorship of one country (U.K.) and not of another (let's say all the Arabic Nations).
Either you subscribe to the rigorous interpretation of free speech in the U.S. or you have to respect each Nation's individual understanding of free speech. Otherwise this is pure cultural imperialism.
"This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Charles Napier, British Commander of India
I think we can safely say that witch-burning, widow-burning, genital mutilation (might there be an interesting observation about a popular US custom here?) and torture are all bad enough to warrant a bit of pressure. But outside of human rights violations, or maybe things that most cultures would agree is bad, these questions become fuzzy enough that you'll be more likely to look like a jackass than do any good. Try to imagine how cultural imperialism would look to you if, for instance, India was the global superpower and not the United States.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html has some good observations about cognitive bias regarding social customs.
All of those are currently illegal.
I'm not sure what Twitter should do - include an abuse button that sends reports to a Twitter team who then report people to the relevant police? Or who then collect evidence in case the police contact Twitter (with suitable legal documentation)?
People do go to jail in the UK for making stupid comments on the Internet.
Here's an English 'troll' who made threats against US schools: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326)
Being able to report illegal content seems like a reasonable request. Being able to report content that breaks the ToS / AUP seems like a reasonable request. Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular (but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to protecting people from harm.
I guess they might want to have some kind of transparency report to show how much stuff gets taken down, how often, and what kind of thing it is.
Of course, free speech does allow a nutjob creationist to pervert science education in Texas, but that's another matter.
Criticism is silenced by other laws, such as libel. Threats to rape women have nothing to do with it.
One of the louder and more influential friends of the woman behind the successful Twitter abuse reporting petition is a particularly charming radical feminist called Cathy Brennan. Brennan believes that trans women are really men attacking women's rights by masquerading as women, and deals with this by systematically outing and doxxing them - we're taking names, photos, addresses, jobs in some cases. She's been known to call the FBI on them and falsely label them as pedophiles (because all trans women are pedophiles in her eyes).
She doesn't consider this harassment. She does, however, consider anyone who objects to her or anyone else doing this - no matter how politely - to be a form of harassment. In addition, she has an organised group of allies with the same views who she gets to dogpile site owners, often successfully. (She's certainly managed to get Wordpress.com blogs reinstated that spectacularly violate the ToS and common decency reinstated, in one case by appealing to Matt Mullenweg directly.)
Naturally, she entirely supports the new Twitter abuse reporting functionality.
I'll be interested if you can come up with a better one. Complaining about edge-cases has its place but doesn't actually provide an answer.
I don't agree with this. Mainly because "protecting people from harm" is not well defined. There are people who seem scared of their own shadow and see nearly everything as potential harm.
EDIT: Not to diminish/trivialize the seriousness of this particular situation, but I still cannot agree with the sentence I quoted as being generally acceptable. As in, I don't want to see a law with that exact sentence in it.
Women are being threatened with violence, rape and death. Even if these are not threats people intend to carry out, to those receiving them they are deeply distressing. The threats are meant to intimidate and silence. Why should anyone put up with that?
The general idea is not worthless, but it's disconnected from reality.
The problem is that any system that could be used to prevent people from making rape threats on the Internet could and inevitably would be used to silence various forms of dissent. We have seen this sort of thing before:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitz...
Yes, Apple is the same as Walmart in laying the dead hand of censorship on popular culture with the aim of increasing its own profits, but in most cases, there is not a legal compulsion to do so.
Otherwise, you've invented a hypothetical problem leading to a hypothetical event.
They shouldn't. Some comments are obviously unacceptable. That's easy. The problem is, as always, where do you draw the line?
It's the comments at the margins of "acceptability" that are the most difficult to deal with and where the arguments of censorship are sure to come from. "You know it when you see it" is not easy to apply.
Threats of unlawful violence. This isn't hard.
> It's the comments at the margins
The US legal system is pretty explicitly biased towards defendants in gray areas, and most marginal cases will never be prosecuted or be thrown out by the judge.
Those that make it through to trial will have a jury determine whether a comment is a threat beyond reasonable doubt, and then the trial judge and at least two appellate judges will have to agree that the jury's verdict was not unreasonable.
Depending on the precise posture of the case, there are tens of judges and an army of clerks beyond that who may see the case cross their desks and provide at least cursory review.
And US courts pay very, very close attention to criminal cases based on speech.
I'm sure Twitter, its users and the legal system are just dying to have marginal cases decided by the courts.
What you've described is the problem I was referring to. One person says one thing, another says something else. A third party has to make the decision on whether it's acceptable or not. That's cumbersome, not very clear cut, and leads to one disgruntled party or at least some controversy.
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
£385 and £600 costs.
I would have been happier if it had been handled with an investigation and warning and not make it to prosecution, but as far as I'm concerned, the guy deserved some nontrivial inconvenience. I'm kind of ambivalent about the fact that the conviction was quashed.
He wasn't even sent to prison. He was fined. I don't think that's a wholly unreasonable way for society to say "don't do that".
I think content platforms like twitter do have a responsibility to make their spaces reasonably safe for their users. This means not allowing one user to make threats against another.
There's a difference between hoping bad something might happen to someone, and threatening to rape them, come round to their house and stab them or telling them you've planted a bomb on their car. Would you argue otherwise?
Shouldn't be in theory, but essentially everyone with any pull in the public debate seems to want Twitter to ban based on whether the user's opinions are politically correct. So, for example, they argue that telling someone to choke on their own vomit is abusive when their opponents do it to them but a vital part of activism that must be protected when they do it to someone they consider deserving.
There's also signficant debate over whether moderators can even enforce policies in a fair and unbiased way: http://storify.com/andustar/twitter-moderation To be honest, I've never seen it happen ever.
The behaviour's really not acceptable. But... do we really need the state involved to deal with some teenager who thinks they're funny?
Weird.
That's awful and obviously shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, given how serious rape threats are, you would presumably agree that anyone who used those rape threats to pressure for censorship of political viewpoints they disagreed with was trivialising rape and should be called out for doing so?
you're just playing cheap word games for politics.
http://www.wired.com/business/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/
Or maybe "just" this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/29/texas-teen...
Quite possibly the opposite:
If this leads to a requirement for microblogging tools to manage their content, Twitter has the most resources to throw at the problem. This allows them to protect their position as the largest incumbent.