
Twitter’s Got a New Harassment Problem: Periscope - screeley
http://blog.embed.ly/post/115215000946/twitters-got-a-new-harassment-problem-periscope
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tptacek
Peter Nickeas is a very well known field journalist, formerly (perhaps still?)
working for the Chicago Trib. His beat is gang violence. He basically hangs
around in the south side livetweeting incidents.

Periscope "clicked" for me when I saw how he used it: basically doing live TV
news broadcasts from crime scenes. Wow. Very, very cool. But about 2 minutes
into watching his first one, next click for me: _comments on this thing should
be disabled by default_.

You want to see harassment, look at racist bullshit hitting the screen as a
reporter documents a south side murder scene.

Periscope can't possibly keep this default. You have to assume they're going
to get around to fixing it.

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grandalf
It was interesting the other evening to watch "ask a black guy anything" and
to see some pretty hateful racist comments get posted.

The guy handled it well but it was clear that some of the viewers were trying
to goad him.

There would be three easy solutions:

1) allow broadcasters to turn off comments entirely (only allowing hearts)

2) allow broadcasters to make comments visible only to themselves, to reduce
the incentive of griefers by shrinking the audience.

3) making all periscope comments into actual tweets.

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pjc50
4) Have an AUP and actually ban violators

5) Support shared blocklists

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strictnein
Disagree with #5 strongly. Shared blocklists are a great way to create echo
chambers. The unofficial ones are already causing problems.

Of the people I follow on Twitter, a surprising number of fairly mainstream
journalists are finding themselves blocked by people they have never
interacted with.

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migueldeicaza
Not really.

The echo chamber is only an issue if you isolate _everything_. But given the
hundreds of thousands of disparate communities, blocking one or two, or even
dozens of groups does not amount to much towards creating an echo chamber.

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strictnein
The blocklists are targeting people in the same communities, but who hold
differing views, so it definitely is creating echo chambers. You don't need to
isolate everything, just those holding opposing views in your community.

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borgia
I'm of two minds about this. Periscope, and indeed any other publicly social
media, is an opt-in service. By using it you're saying "I want attention | I
want to draw attention to myself | I want to draw attention to something". By
publicly social media I mean publicly accessible Twitter accounts and similar,
not private Facebook accounts.

People in the "public eye" invariably draw positive and negative attention.
Does what amounts to narcissism need to be further coddled by essentially
automatically filtering out negativity?

I understand that the tool could do with some work for private/family/friend
only streaming or similar, but if you're going to put yourself out into the
public forefront you should be able to take the good with the bad.

Cyberbullying is rampant, it's a big issue, but it's not a technology issue.
The issue is with the people using it. For every kid that's experiencing
cyberbullying there's another kid on the opposite end bullying them online.
Let's stop trying to push responsibility onto the platform provider and
instead focus on the people involved.

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igorgue
By FAR! "That's the internet" is the real explanation of this.

When I get annoyed at this kind of stuff one of my best friends always tell me
"don't be a little bitch"... And it's true, since the very beginning of the
internet as we know it there has always been harassment, the only opinion
about yourself that matters is yours.

And really if you get annoyed at this, you can always choose not to use this
software. Same way you choose not to go to /b/. Don't be entitled to make the
software work for you, and likely Twitter makes more money from trolls than
from whiners.

I don't know if it's a culture thing but you guys (mostly west coast people)
have a very thin skin and just take yourself way too seriously.

Guess what? I found all the comments funny and entertaining.

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doki_pen
Even the one that said, "Can fat girls wear buns?". I have a pretty good sense
of humor, but I was puzzled by that "joke".

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kwntm
Periscope is a ton of fun to use, and I've had some wonderful experiences. The
problem here is that it will be the first time a lot of people do
livestreaming. Coming in and seeing these obscene comments is unsettling and
certainly makes it harder to do the next stream. Think of those who might
already be targeted for harassment, of voices that might be underrepresented,
and make the tool more welcoming for them. This will not make the app unusable
for others, rather it makes it a better experience for everyone.

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trhway
>This will not make the app unusable for others, rather it makes it a better
experience for everyone.

has it happened yet to chatroulette? or this time this app is different?

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arthurgibson
Yea I felt a chatroulette-esque experience coming from this app. I think with
Twitter at the helm, there is a team ready to make this right.

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VLM
The logic is a bit mystifying, in the same article you have

"When you hop into Periscope, you see streams from all around the world. From
an engagement perspective, this is fantastic."

right next to

"There where only about 12 viewers of this stream, meaning a quarter of users
watching were there to do harm."

On what planet of 6 billion people, is having two-billionths of the population
tune in where most of them are weirdos be fantastic engagement?

If (when?) that app dies, assuming you can anthropomorphize something with
that little traction "alive", two billionths of the world population are going
to be really sad. The trolls will likely move on to pester the non-app users,
so us 5999999986 unimportant people are going to have to put up with trolling
where we hang out. Oh well.

I can imagine lasting societal value to an app that acts as little more than a
honeypot for trolls.

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AustinScript
A single stream had 12 viewers watching, the site is composed of multiple
streams.

Perhaps the point was people from all over the world are using it rather than
the product being popular only in a single region of the world?

I'd say your logic is more misguided then mystifying.

(P.S. - The world population is closer to 7 billion)

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solve
Chatroulette 2.0?

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camhenlin
Totally what I was thinking

