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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with.

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.

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I'm genuinely interested to hear you say that, why do you cringe? Because it doesn't affect you and you don't perceive there to be a problem?

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.

Because such stories are usually knee-jerk reactions, badly argumented, badly researched, un-objective, and assume some opinions that not everyone agrees with are facts. Furthermore, pointing this out can inspire rage and insults from a part of the online population. Finally, they induce a flame-war with no clear victors and no apparent benefits for the victors. They don't really encourage discussion, just as most static-dynamic do not.

I'm genuinely interested to hear you say that, why do you cringe? Because it doesn't affect you and you don't perceive there to be a problem?

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.

I am hoping that with deliberate practice, HN will become capable of a mature discussion about these topics. It is important enough to keep trying, even though it is hard.

This

> 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.

Sarcasm?

I mean, you just said you can't tolerate anything related to gender equality. Eeesh.

No, I meant that I can't stand an HN discussion about those topics, because my experience is that it'll be filled with sexism and victim-blaming.

Exactly the reason that we need to keep on having these discussions. I frequently see some awfulness going on in these threads, but I also see people standing up to it and engaging in constructive discussion.

We need to keep pushing this forwards. It benefits everyone.

How can Twitter prevent people from posting abusive messages? Should they have some sort of keyword filter that prohibits specific words and regexs that match addresses?

They can't prevent the initial abuse, of course, but they could, at the very least, think about the people who are affected by these attacks before making changes, instead of rolling back only after there's an outcry.

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.

Flag it but after awhile, the moderators will prevent your account from flagging stories or comments.

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