
Twitter CEO: 'We suck at dealing with abuse' - ssclafani
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-memo-taking-personal-responsibility-for-the
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A_COMPUTER
Twitter is built for harassing. The medium makes it inevitable. you make a
tweet and you shoot it out into the ether. It ends up on a couple million
twitter feeds whether they asked for it or not. It angers some of those
people, and they retweet it to show their followers how stupid you are. Now
all their like-minded friends see that tweet in their feeds. A bunch of them
are now aware of your existence and are mad and tweet back at you. This is far
worse when you participate in a contentious issue on a hashtag. This is before
you even get into hate-following and active-deliberate harassers. Then there
is scale. There are a couple hundred million people on Twitter. If even .01%
of them are sociopaths, that is a near-unmanageable problem.

Finally, a significant portion of Twitter is quite literally trolls trolling
trolls. They both can dish it out and take it and don't see the problem. Good
for them, but it's not compatible with everybody else.

~~~
zaius
I think Reddit is really interesting in this respect - you have pro skub and
anti skub subreddits sitting side by side. Yes, they get caught up in downvote
brigading and whatnot, but battles aren't the status quo like on twitter.

On reddit, the subreddits you subscribe to are your choice, but if the groups
of users on twitter are homogenous enough then I wonder if you could automate
siloing of users. People with correlated behavior get moved into their own
silos and then if you or other users in your silo block a person, they don't
show up in your feed.

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josephlord
I think anonymous accounts should be expensive (in terms of time) to set up.
Anonymity and pseudonyms are important for those who need to whistleblow or
are from oppressed groups so the possibility absolutely needs to be preserved.
But what isn't needed is cheap throwaway accounts that can be used for abuse
and then discarded as soon as they are banned.

If to sign up anonymously you had to do something, a quiz or play through a
game that took about 30 minutes then that would reduce the rate of account
creation for abuse. If you were prepared to give a real phone number (and use
it for verification) then you could bypass the task and get an instant account
but obviously any ban would apply to the phone number not just that particular
account.

~~~
newhouseb
Exactly this, and what's so mind boggling is that this is not a new problem by
any means. I'm sure that among twitter's worries is how to effectively scale
an abuse prevention operation, but there are some pretty easy automatic
filters that would go a long way. A few that come to mind (provided accounts
are tied to phone numbers):

1) A block that prevents the harasser from even @mentioning the harassee in
any way.

2) Automatic disabling of accounts that are blocked by more than two users
whom the harasser explicitly @mentioned

3) A "dog house" mode which automatically disables distribution of a user's
tweets who have been reported as harassment without explicitly telling them,
leaving them to harass nothingness until they get bored and leave.

~~~
josephlord
Number 2 could probably be abused. Get several people to respond to somebody
and when they reply block them.

Number 3 needs to be applied carefully as wrongfully banned people (it does
happen) will be harmed.

~~~
newhouseb
(replying to both since they're effectively the same comment)

Abuse of such things is definitely a challenge, and there is finesse on
choosing the right thresholds. I doubt twitter can fully escape manual
moderation and as such one of the goals of a system like this would simply be
to reduce the number of situations that require human intervention.
Undoubtedly, there will be false positives, but abuse of the abuse system will
likely be rarer than abuse as a whole and if a human moderates and finds such
meta-abuse it would be grounds for the strictest means of blocking twitter can
provide, thereby hopefully incentivizing against it.

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nailer
Who defines harassment? I've seen someone be banned from Twitter for
criticising someone they've never even contacted. The Verge, in one article,
along with actual threats, said a person who did not threaten but simply
insulted another person was a harasser. People in arguments publish other
people's phone numbers to a few thousand followers, they'll drop off and then
come online again. AFAICT the argument goes that if you insult someone, it's
'calling them out' but if someone insults you it's 'harassment'.

~~~
rodgerd
Right in the article: [http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-
of-hara...](http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-
harassment-on-twitter)

But frankly, if you're pulling in you anecdote to imply that there's no
problem, I doubt you actually give a shit.

~~~
nailer
That article is the one mentioned in the post you're replying to. There's
actual, horrible threats there, but there's also many people who simply
insulted someone else. The Verge seems to think they're equivalent. They're
not.

The Verge also ignores death threats and postal threats this person's
followers have made - as the parent said, when it's the side you like, it's
fine, when it's the side you don't, it's harassment.

You mentioned I 'pulled in an anecdote and don't give a shit'. Harassment
normally involves contacting someone, rather than simply insulting someone, so
that case seems quite relevant. Re: 'don't give a shit', I do care about this
issue, I can simply see the obvious inconsistencies.

I think there's a problem, but not with Twitter the company. I think it's with
people who talk about nuanced topics over 140 character sound bytes, and the
egos at play on Twitter.

~~~
jarcane
Why is verbal abuse always the first battlefield of the internet 'free speech'
advocate?

~~~
pain
Coming from experiencing extreme verbal abuse offline, id counter by
expressing how even just talking about and repeating forms of verbal abuse is
dangerous.

Maturing moderation through systems such as Aether
([http://www.getaether.com](http://www.getaether.com)) is going to need free
speech to evolve systems to filter freely.

Social media support group systems struggle with talking about trouble
directly because we're waging war on words, when we still need to start
addressing battles.

~~~
jarcane
I am totally onboard with better self-moderation tools; I'm a proud user of
BlockTogether and theBlockBot, they've made Twitter almost 100% more pleasant
to use than it was before.

I've even had some ideas myself on apps that might provide better platforms
for some, I just haven't got the chops to pull it off yet. In particular I
think we need more platforms that allow public address without the implicit
expectation that doing so makes you open season for every anonymous troll on
the internet.

I think that services as well can do a better job turning all this 'big data
science' to problems like this; it doesn't take a genius to realize that if a
Twitter account pops up with no followers and its first few dozen messages are
all loaded with invective and little else, maybe that account wasn't made in
good faith.

~~~
pain
Committing ignorance can be read as trolling and dangerous, so problem-solving
by forcing a win-lose memory process, ends by repressing asking to account for
any deeper empathic accuracy of a real stable log.

What genius is let go is if we can design a system that lets users filter, and
share filters, without categorically/deleteriously removing parts of people's
real life data we have trouble with.

If we want to wholly deal with safety, sanity, abuse, pain, and words we
equate power to record, we need to be able to read and write by sorting with
due diligence enough to keep every end together, every bit of speech a turn
worthy of ID, and then let users tool ways to filter, tag, label, and identify
problems openly.

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jbob2000
Twitter isn't alone in this. Facebook and Snapchat both have issues with
harassment. YikYak had a bad case of it too. I think that if these companies
really care about curbing harassment, they would approach each other and
tackle the issue together. If someone is trolling on facebook, they probably
do it on twitter too.

Riot Games (League of Legends) has The Tribunal, where players who harass get
judgements handed down from other players. Perhaps social media needs a
tribunal of sorts, with participation from Twitter et al to enact "sentences".

