Twitter- optimised for abuse
weekwoman.wordpress.com
weekwoman.wordpress.com
Also, it seems unusual to hold Twitter responsible for their users' speech. UI tweaks may reduce the amount of hatred seen, but they are not going to solve this problem.
Lastly, I spent some time perusing other posts on this blog. They are not furthering any discussion, to put it mildly. Likewise, I doubt the comments here will generate much light. It's a sad situation, but I don't think HN has much to contribute.
If she called law enforcement every time she got a threatening tweet or email, there's a good chance the cops would stop taking her seriously. They only have so many man-hours to dedicate to investigations like this, and each one takes a while. In the mean time, she's still subject to more abuse which strains her mental health even more. I wouldn't discount the possibility of serious self-harm in cases like these.
While it would be nice if there were a streamlined process to report threats like these to the police, and a streamlined process for the police to investigate them, there's a more important action here: protecting innocent people. Twitter has the means and ability, and in my view should be a moral imperative, to keep people from harm if they can help it. Twitter can do more to protect people from hate speech and abusive language, which would greatly reduce the suffering of many people.
We don't have to hold Twitter responsible for how their users treat others, but we do have to hold Twitter responsible for how they treat their users - which is to enable their abuse by other users. Can you imagine if ten Starbucks customers were verbally abusing one woman and the Starbucks employees did nothing? At the very least, Starbucks should be expected to call the police on behalf of the victim, just as Twitter should do. Sadly, we don't hold social media companies to the same moral standards as a coffee shop.
If she was crying wolf multiple times, that's one thing - but the threats against her are undeniable.
But are they credible? Someone could (and probably has) write a bot to make idle threats against dozens of feminists on a daily basis. Should the police investigate every one of them?
The key here is that they're not threatening to commit a crime - the threat itself is the crime.
If a man on the internet says that he's gonna come to your house tonight and rape you, and then it turns out that he lives in Britain and you live in Canada, does that make getting the rape threat any less terrifying?
Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others?
If you haven't heard of CCP before, you should take some time to read about the amount of abuse she's faced for campaigning on important women's issues over the last year or so. She's not just some random blogger, she's an important figure in the UK due to the campaigning she's done and the abuse she's received through twitter. This belongs on Hacker News exactly because it's about the intersection of Tech and human beings, and the lack of foresight which has allowed some of this abuse to occur.
Startups should be paying attention to stories like this when they look to design services that are safe spaces that everyone can use without being abused or terrorised by other users.
Because I like Hacker News. If Hacker News was responsible for the posts of its users, it would not exist. The value it provides for Y Combinator would not match the risk.
Also, email as we know it would not exist. The price of stamps would skyrocket as the postal service would need to hire people to read all letters in case they contained death threats. If any of the web services deserves common carrier protection, it would be twitter.
Whenever something bad happens (like here), there will always be demands for more surveillance. More central control. These demands are just, the victims are real. And the solution exist. We could have a world with only a few highly curated and monitored for pay communication channels, where death threads plus anything else our governments want to keep out would be kept out.
Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks unable to emphasize with the victims. Or can easily be portrayed that way.
Righteous indignation comes with a price.
1, hacker news IS responsible for the content that appears on it. If someone posts something that hacker news is legally obliged to remove, they will (not to mention we know that hacker news engages in hellbans etc).
2, email is a commonly used set of protocols, not a company product. You could think of the postal service in a similar way. They act more like dumb pipes, but email hosts differ from real world post in that they have an added responsibility to make sure they aren't used as spam relays. Twitter/hacker news etc are not dumb pipes.
3, in this paranoid tech world, women asking to be safe on social networks and the internet, and asking to be able to report abuse is equated to state spying and invasive surveillance, what the fuck. What the actual fuck. People just want to be able safely use the internet without having themselves threatened.
> Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks
If people are easily portrayed as having their foot in their mouth, there might be a reason for this. When you start conflating women's safety with state surveillance your foot is safely planted deep in your mouth.
Perhaps, and I'm going out on a limb here, just perhaps, part of protecting against the tyranny of surveillance and invasive state practices might be making the internet a strong safe place for anyone, so governments don't step in and do it for us in a way we really dislike.
It only took me a few minutes to think of various things we could do to aid them ranging from a UI more optimized for blocking and reporting; services to offer pre-filtering of comments.
The one concrete thing that Twitter could do (and should do in my opinion) is helping actual criminal charges to be filed for hate speech (inciting to violence.)
I'm still convinced that the only reason this persists is because the perpetrators believe, and so far they're right, that they will not be meaningfully punished for behaviour like this.
There is occasionally legal action taken about tweets, but it's so rare and inconsistently applied that it manages to be a threat to free speech but not to actual abuse.
That is why we can't contribute.
How is this so easy in copyright cases and so hard in cases like this? If a few theoretical dollars in royalties count so much more than safety of innocent citizens, things really are upside down in favor of big money.
I realize there are limited LE and prosecutorial resources, and they have to prioritize etc., but threats like these are prosecuted in "real world" cases all the time. And a few convictions in egregious cases (like this), reported in the news, would probably exert a civilizing effect on the lowlife of Twitter (maybe just motivating them to go elsewhere).
They're not mutually exclusive. Twitter should still take all reasonable steps to prevent abuse.
I don't think HN has much to contribute.
I completely agree; I cringe every time something vaguely related to feminism or gender equality is posted here. I'm not sure if I should flag it or not, though.
This is clearly a technology story, and I'm interested to hear more from anyone at Twitter how their release process works in this regard. I saw Kent Beck talk at facebook a while back and he spoke about how when working on a site like FB, you literally do have peoples lives in your hands. Releasing that software is a very hard problem. The example he gave was if they accidentally allowed public access to someones private mail- it could literally lead to deaths.
No, I cringe because I know there is a problem, and more sexism - which is rampant in these threads - doesn't help. HN as a whole is simply not capable of having a mature discussion about these topics.
Sarcasm?
I mean, you just said you can't tolerate anything related to gender equality. Eeesh.
We need to keep pushing this forwards. It benefits everyone.
Simple measures, such as banning a whole IP from contacting/following/mentioning the person who reported it, should help a lot. And if they want to allow comments from Tor and other proxies - and I think they should! -, they could allow users to block everyone using them from contacting/following/mentioning them.
In general, they could give a damn, instead of just reacting to criticism.
Yes, this woman received unacceptable messages via twitter. Yes, there need to be mechanisms to deal with it.
However, from her Twitter history you can clearly see she was online into the early hours stoking the trolls, fanning the flames.
She DM'd some random Twitter employee until he got fed up with her and made his tweets private.
She even @-mentioned Barack Obama, asking him to intervene. Seriously.
She claims that she successfully forced the Bank of England to change the design of a new banknote so that a woman appeared on it. Even though there has previously been a banknote featuring a woman; and every single item of UK currency has a woman on it (the Queen).
Her strategy to seek attention by using Twitter's name is win-win. If they change their policy, she was successful and claims credit. If they don't, she can keep bashing them using their high profile name to attract attention.
She did
Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people who are obscenity averse might like to enable it too. Heck, I might even enable it myself when reading the activity on some hashtags.
This is a social problem without a technical solution, even not permitting blocked people of following and retweet like she'd like to is of litle use when it takes seconds to create a new account...
On the bright side, I don't think there is much in the way of following up on those threats in meatspace, cowards will be cowards...
The issue here is that the offensive text is so close to the desired text, to the point that quoting threatening material makes it non threatening. The tweet 'He said "You will be raped tonight"' may be as non threatening as it gets, while "You will be raped tonight" should land its author before a judge.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's IMHO very hard.
But a few things make it easier too:
1. Twitter can see all messages from the sender -- if the stream contains a lot of suspect material and was created recently (for example), that makes any individual Tweet more suspect. No individual mail client can do this. 2. A 'false positive' in Twitter has a lower cost than in email. People ignore tweets all the time, so hiding the wrong thing sometimes won't matter so much. 3. Twitter is a more constrained platform, so the problem domain is presumably more limited.
I don't mean to say it's easy or even "not very hard" to pull this off -- just that it is either well within Twitter's capabilities, or soon could be.
The real issue here though is that these trolls know that there will be no legal consequences for their actions. That needs to change for anything to change and Twitter does have a key role to play in that... they're just understandably reluctant to do so.
Given that there are real costs attached to addressing the issue (not just legal but also in terms of engagement statistics) as a rational business they will probably delay addressing the issue until the costs of ignoring it (in terms of bad publicity) exceed the benefits.
"Block" effectively does nothing...what Twitter should've done is label the button something like "Ignore"...which would allow you to never be notified when that user sends a direct reply or mentions you...but would not have the same connotation as actively blocking that person in the way that a restraining order "blocks" someone.
As much as Twitter is seen as a superficial surface, nothing more than a dumbed-down micro version of blogging...the technicalities that underly its open nature is something that is hard to grok until you actively use it. I remember the "aha" moment for me was reading the report of when Demi Moore, an early Twitter celebrity, responded to a random person's suicide threat...just sending someone famous such a message would be impossible on Facebook, and pretty difficult on email (even if you knew the address, people/spam-systems are trained to filter such random messages out)...but in Twitter's early days, you had a decent chance of your crazy message being seen by just about anybody. That's the magic/insanity of Twitter for you.
"Germaine Greer once wrote that women have no idea how much men hate them. Thanks to the internet, now we do." https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/361043650970529792
Blocking and ignoring are different, and both useful.
Does anyone know anything about the change control for the UI features at twitter?
Maybe it's harder for me to grok as someone who never really got into Twitter in the first place.
Internet communications are hard, tone-of-voice is meta information that we jokingly try to add with <sarcasm> and <jk> tags but when those are omitted real trouble can ensue.
Anonymous threats are rarely worth the value of the medium used for their conveyance.
I'm not clear from this post if there was any contact with Twitter to discuss why the feature in question had been removed. That would always seem like a first step to take. In addition, it seems pretty clear that it's twitter "bug" (https://twitter.com/safety/status/465797191869554688) — realistically, probably a change that nobody thought about or noticed, rather than an actual bug.
What's the difference between an unintended change and a bug?