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Twitter Continues To Have A [Twitter] Problem
AngelHedgie
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Registered User regular
So, as mentioned in the Weinstein thread, Twitter opened a can of worms when it suspended the account of actress Rose McGowan over tweets directed at Ben Affleck. Twitter tried to defuse this by claiming they had done so because she had violated their policy by posting a personal telephone numbers.
This wound up being the wrong move.
Immediately, women, minorities, and members of other marginalized groups began recounting how Twitter, when informed of their personal information being posted on Twitter as part of an attack on them, had responded that the tweets did not violate the terms of service. (Most notably, the St. Louis Police Department, during the recent protests over a cop being allowed to literally get away with murder, tweeted the contact information of protesters. Twitter has not sanctioned the SLPD, and the tweet is still up.) This has lead to a group of women to declare a day long boycott of Twitter for today.
Which leaves one to wonder - how did we end up here? And for me, the answer comes back to this:
Twitter has a Twitter problem.
This comment that was made elsewhere was illuminating for me:
What amazes me is that they do, in fact, track these abusive accounts in order to comply with French and German law, but do nothing more than just block them from appearing in those countries. And this is the heart of Twitter's Twitter problem - they find it more important to give a platform to abusers than to prevent abuse.
This wound up being the wrong move.
Immediately, women, minorities, and members of other marginalized groups began recounting how Twitter, when informed of their personal information being posted on Twitter as part of an attack on them, had responded that the tweets did not violate the terms of service. (Most notably, the St. Louis Police Department, during the recent protests over a cop being allowed to literally get away with murder, tweeted the contact information of protesters. Twitter has not sanctioned the SLPD, and the tweet is still up.) This has lead to a group of women to declare a day long boycott of Twitter for today.
Which leaves one to wonder - how did we end up here? And for me, the answer comes back to this:
Twitter has a Twitter problem.
This comment that was made elsewhere was illuminating for me:
Just so everyone's clear on where Twitter's priorities are: they already know who the Nazis on their platform are. They're required to flag Nazi accounts so that they do not appear when you use Twitter from a German or French IP address. That means that there's already an existing flag that they could use to trivially ban a huge portion of the fascist recruiting and propaganda effort from their service at any moment. Guess why they haven't.
The fastest way to get infracted on Twitter is still to yell at fascists or white supremacists. You can say back to them the same things that they're saying to you and you will get suspended while they will not. On the other hand, people do not get infracted for talking about how they wish they could enslave black people or shovel Jewish people into ovens, and of course basically any kind of harassment is okay as long as the target is a woman. The company is too cowardly to make their positions clear, but if you just follow the pattern of their behavior it becomes pretty obvious.
She puts someone's private number in a tweet which is one of the few cardinal sins on Twitter.
That's not true. People do this all the time. Tons of protesters have been doxxed very thoroughly (and often incorrectly!) on right-wing Twitter, and if you report those posts you'll be told that they don't violate the ToS. This is a bald-faced lie from the Twitter support team that is meant to sound reasonable to people who aren't very involved with Twitter. Please don't fall for it.
What amazes me is that they do, in fact, track these abusive accounts in order to comply with French and German law, but do nothing more than just block them from appearing in those countries. And this is the heart of Twitter's Twitter problem - they find it more important to give a platform to abusers than to prevent abuse.
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Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Last I heard it was still just a money sink. So what do they really have to show for letting Nazis run rampant on their platform anyway?
Are they selling user data to companies or something?
They sell ads. This causes them a bit of a problem as bots and high volume assholes make them money...but drive off other users.
2) Twitter should make the French and German account bans apply platform-wide
These seem like separate propositions that should be distinguished, yet that get run together in the OP. The first is completely unobjectionable--it's hard to imagine how you could disagree. The second, by contrast, just re-raises all the classic debates about free speech and hate speech and all that.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
If you use it or not has no bearing on the fact the current US president uses it almost exlusively to communicate with our country. Horrible people not the president also use it as a tool of oppression and harassment. It's not about you, its about this awful platform.
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Have they ever completely blocked/banned a huge swath of people? I see that if you've got a German/French IP (perhaps from a lawsuit/law?) they're blocked, but is there any evidence that they've completely removed others? Perhaps it's not in their best interest to completely block a not-insignificant amount of people from using their service? As mentioned Twitter is already bleeding money right? So if they start completely removing people then it doesn't look good for their business. It's unfortunate but they're a business.
Is there any evidence of this? I get that if you're yelling at anyone you can get infracted/banned (which is a valid stance for a company to take) but is there any evidence that they are okay if you're yelling or screaming at a minority/woman but not okay with you yelling/screaming at a nazi/fascist? Maybe the Nazi snowflake reports the comment immediately (along with his bots/followers) and it gets removed faster than if one or two people report a single comment?
And the St. Louis thing is odd. Their arrests are public record, but they really shouldn't have put it in a hashtag. I have hard time calling it doxxing, though since anyone can view that list if they wanted to.
But, as others have said, fuck Twitter and everything it stands for. I hope this really is the straw that breaks the camels back.
Depends who their market is. If they want the Neo nazi, white supremacist, racist crowd that's the right tactic - if they want everyone else, that's what's going to show the slightest glimmer that audience should care about being on that platform.
If that's the case then why, as a business, would you even market to such a small subset of your overall base? Even if you 100% agree with their bullshit. If you're bleeding red you can't afford to not market to the larger portion. Although this IS Twitter so maybe it really is just a shit-run business that's somehow managed to stay afloat.
A lot of fledgling authors are told they must have a social media presence and be responsible for getting publicity out on their book, and twitter is one of the largest platforms out there.
Woe be to any woman or minority that wants to be an author in the era of social media.
Nazi using the internet anonymously
Nazi using the internet non privately
Internet outing people that were previously thought as a "normal person" as an actual fuckwad
Etc
That's my guess.
Is there some examples of this?
I'm curious about this too. I think it's probably a case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease", but I'd interested in seeing this.
If you aren't willing to actually stop using the service in response to their fuckery, why the hell would they change anything? My entire exposure to Twitter is through this forum, and I'd avoid it here if it were possible.
We saw the same issue with YouTube and the Adpocalypse, and with Reddit and the hate subreddits - all these SV darlings keep putting the albatross of bigotry around their neck even when it's clear to everyone that it's killing them.
At this point, one has to wonder if there's more going on, especially in light of reports of white nationalists recruiting in the tech community and how all sorts of people funneled information and targets to Breitbart and white supremacists.
(That last link could be a thread on its own.)
Each one got a completely different reaction.
Yup. One of the line from that article is "The hashtag #WomenBoycottTwitter has been shared more than 190,000 times in a matter of hours."
They left out the on Twitter part. Chances are there's more tweets about the boycott than missing tweets from the boycott
And then there stuff like this:
If it's a godforsaken website you're so relieved to get away from for a day... why not forever? A one day boycott is utterly irrelevant
I've seen this on facebook quite a bit; but not on twitter. Someone will be harassed on their page/in comments, that person will share the comment on their feed, and be suspended/banned for posting language that goes against their ToS, while the person who actually made the comment goes unpunished.
Because, as was pointed out above, people may not have the choice to do so, because of network effects and the importance of social media in the cultivation of one's social profile.
Because Twitter doesn't stop being relevant just cause you ignore it.
But that's exactly what it does. Nobody's worried about deplorables on Myspace right now, are they? Twitter's only relevance comes from its viewership. If their users (that's you) aren't willing to leave, they have no incentive to change.
Because most reporters need to engage with twitter as part of their job. Employers want reporters with a twitter presence to help promote their organization. It's also a huge networking tool, which forcing women out of is kind of a shitty thing
You have the choice to do so, right? The high-profile people stuck in the service are only stuck there because of the masses of regular people who won't leave no matter how bad it gets. I'm sorry, but you are part of the problem.
Nobody worries about MySpace period because it's a practically irrelevant platform. It shouldn't be women that have to give up using a widely viewed platform over bigots.
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MySpace collapsed because Facebook undercut it through building up a base in colleges, then using that base to expand into society at large. Which comes back, once again, to why the "let's just move away" argument doesn't work - network effects. You, alone, moving away will do nothing. You would need to effect a mass migration from from service. The problem is, Twitter is where all the users are, where all the conversations are happening. And that pulls people into its orbit. Again, MySpace didn't jus "fail", it had a competitor build up its own network, which let it pull people away.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kz57j/this-is-how-twitter-blocks-far-right-tweets-in-germany
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/10/19/163243194/twitter-blocks-offensive-accounts-in-germany-u-k-deletes-tweets-in-france
A platform becomes irrelevant when the audience leaves. So why aren't you giving up the platform?
It's a collective action problem, for one, so this answer is bullshit. And secondly, like the President of the motherfucking United States runs foreign policy out of twitter. And that's just the start. So, no, it's not going to become irrelevant any time soon.
The idea that if a bunch of women just walk away from the platform it's all gonna go away is utter bullshit.
Look, you can walk away from Omelas, or you can whine and keep using their service. Talk is cheap. The former has a small but nonzero positive effect, the latter has zero positive effect.
The solution is to attempt to apply pressure to the platforms in use and built in the future to have some measure of control/safeguards in place to address abuse but that can't be easily abused in and of themselves.
"But that's really hard!" some will say.
Yeah, no kidding. I never said it'd be easy. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's acceptable.
The effect is not non-zero, it's just zero and pretending otherwise is laughable. No one cares if random twitter user X walks away. Even 1000 random twitter users. Not when major news stories break on twitter or when major outlets and groups and individuals use the platform to communicate.
This shit you are saying is like saying "You don't need a website".
Can confirm that every on-air talent at my station is required to have a professional Twitter account that is regularly updated. And the shit people feel free to tweet at them is awful and the company is irresponsible for forcing it on them.
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