
Twitter boss 'sorry' to abused women - equilibrium
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23559605
======
regal
_She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to
come up with this.

"Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the
old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which
sits behind the button.

"The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're
under sustained attack like I have been.

"Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure,
to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop
them."_

\-----------------

Two thoughts:

One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new
functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic.

Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps
they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure
only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who
doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately
censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually
sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.

~~~
brador
It looks to me like they want customer service on a free service.

~~~
6d0debc071
If people didn't want services on free services, then the people who were
using them to make money would be up the creek. Adding 'customer' in front of
that concept doesn't change the underlying relationship.

~~~
brador
Human customer service doesn't scale well. The number of false flags Twitter
will get on this report button is non trivial. Most people are assholes when
they get power, and that report button is power. It will be used by some to
remove people they don't like from Twitter. We've seen the same on other
services (youtube), and we'll see it here.

~~~
6d0debc071
_> Human customer service doesn't scale well._

Mmm, well, there you're changing your argument on me ^_^;

Okay, let's talk about that instead. Problems: False positives, (from whose
perspective?) low staff to customer ratio.

Potential solutions:

Recruit volunteer staff

Pros: More staff. Cons: Some of them are going to be evil.

Let users report people they don't want to hear from (as you point out, this
is how it will work)

Pros: Reduces staff tasks Cons: Again, might be used for evil

So, essentially what we seem to be looking at with the above problems is a
trust issue. If you give people binary access to total power, even on a
probabilistic basis as per the report function, then it's going to be abuse.

Potential solutions:

Give people more limited forms of power than banning and not banning.

Pros: - varies Cons: Less deterrents?

How might we do that?

Potential solutions: Let people ban others from their accounts.

Pros: No longer have to worry about people who just don't like someone banning
them. Cons: Loses a lot of the social deterrent effect, people who joke about
rape probably don't care about continuing to talk to the person they're
attacking anyway. Cons: Doesn't let you network with people who are likely to
share your values, so you'll get exposed to attacks anyway.

(This seems to be the current state of affairs - I don't really use twitter so
I don't know, but suggestions on pages seem to imply it.)

If we solve the second problem there, the first one becomes less of an issue.
At this point it starts to look like a networking and evidence problem. If we
have ban groups - that you can join or unjoin as you please, to make abuse
less likely, and have each individual user's decisions absolutely override any
group level decision for their account.

Okay, what are the potential problems with that?

How would you vote?

If someone's banned from one person's account gets banned from all of them,
then as the group increases the power of any individual within that group will
increase.

Require more than one person to make a decision to get rid of someone?

How do we stop groups of thugs just voting to shut someone up?

Choose a representative sample? Say by forwarding the reported post to three
people within the group and having them all sign off on it.

Downside is you duplicate work - upside is you reduce the potential for them
all to be evil - and if the group itself is evil then it's not a group that
people would want to be part of anyway.

How do you keep trolls out? If the group consistently votes against your
reports, then your reports stop being received?

==========================

I don't know, admittedly this isn't my area and this is like ten minutes
thought. But it doesn't seem to me like an absolutely unsolvable problem as
much as it seems a bit tricky.

~~~
brador
The situation for Twitter is messy no matter what they do. A report link also
opens them up to a tiny liability of 'I reported it and you did nothing', so
they'll likely default to leaning on ban first ask questions later. Again,
just like Youtube has. Messy, but interesting to follow what they do.

------
stfu
I absolutely dislike this development. It seems beyond my understanding why
Twitter is becoming the judge over which value systems around the world are
the right ones to enforce and which ones are the wrong ones.

If they want to play that whole culture sensitivity game, they also need to
censor all negative statements against religious figures - because there is
certainly some nation, somewhere in the world, which has laws against that.

It seems to me absolutely unacceptable why Twitter is bowing to free-speech
censorship of one country (U.K.) and not of another (let's say all the Arabic
Nations).

Either you subscribe to the rigorous interpretation of free speech in the U.S.
or you have to respect each Nation's individual understanding of free speech.
Otherwise this is pure cultural imperialism.

~~~
yummyfajitas
What's wrong with cultural imperialism? Some cultures just suck, and cultural
relativism is nonsense.

 _" This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my
nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and
confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on
which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act
according to national customs."_

Charles Napier, British Commander of India

~~~
marvin
Cultural imperialism is wrong when you can't be absolutely, unequivocally
certain that your own culture is in the right. Which means that most of the
time, cultural imperialism is bad. I don't know how much you've been
travelling, but every place you'll visit you will see that there are big and
small differences. Most of these will be weird to you, and some will be
offensive. This is true even for very similar cultures, like for instance
those of Australia and the United States. It becomes pretty obvious that it's
usually impossible to be _right_ in the scientific sense, when it comes to
customs and cultural norms.

I think we can safely say that witch-burning, widow-burning, genital
mutilation (might there be an interesting observation about a popular US
custom here?) and torture are all bad enough to warrant a bit of pressure. But
outside of human rights violations, or maybe things that _most_ cultures would
agree is bad, these questions become fuzzy enough that you'll be more likely
to look like a jackass than do any good. Try to imagine how cultural
imperialism would look to you if, for instance, India was the global
superpower and not the United States.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) has
some good observations about cognitive bias regarding social customs.

------
DanBC
I don;t know if there's a cultural difference, but people in the UK are
generally okay with preventing people making threats to rape, kill, or bomb
women.

All of those are currently illegal.

I'm not sure what Twitter should do - include an abuse button that sends
reports to a Twitter team who then report people to the relevant police? Or
who then collect evidence in case the police contact Twitter (with suitable
legal documentation)?

People do go to jail in the UK for making stupid comments on the Internet.

Here's an English 'troll' who made threats against US schools:
([http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-
england-22813326))

Being able to report illegal content seems like a reasonable request. Being
able to report content that breaks the ToS / AUP seems like a reasonable
request. Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular
(but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to
protecting people from harm.

I guess they might want to have some kind of transparency report to show how
much stuff gets taken down, how often, and what kind of thing it is.

~~~
alan_cx
Free speech in the UK is under massive threat. But no one really cares. Much
like the US reaction to the NSA thing. People think it wont have and effect on
them, so they just ignore it. People who do care about free speech, and
privacy, are subtly marginalized as radicals, which is presented as being a
step or two away from being a terrorist or pervert.

~~~
scholia
Free speech does not include the right to threaten rape or violence, or to
harass women. That is the case both online an offline. Try saying something
like this in a loud voice in a pub and see how you get on:
[https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312](https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312)

Of course, free speech does allow a nutjob creationist to pervert science
education in Texas, but that's another matter.

~~~
makomk
Define "harassing", and "women" too for that matter.

One of the louder and more influential friends of the woman behind the
successful Twitter abuse reporting petition is a particularly charming radical
feminist called Cathy Brennan. Brennan believes that trans women are really
men attacking women's rights by masquerading as women, and deals with this by
systematically outing and doxxing them - we're taking names, photos,
addresses, jobs in some cases. She's been known to call the FBI on them and
falsely label them as pedophiles (because all trans women are pedophiles in
her eyes).

She doesn't consider this harassment. She does, however, consider anyone who
objects to her or anyone else doing this - no matter how politely - to be a
form of harassment. In addition, she has an organised group of allies with the
same views who she gets to dogpile site owners, often successfully. (She's
certainly managed to get Wordpress.com blogs reinstated that spectacularly
violate the ToS and common decency reinstated, in one case by appealing to
Matt Mullenweg directly.)

Naturally, she entirely supports the new Twitter abuse reporting
functionality.

~~~
tzs
So? I don't see how anything useful can be concluded from what you say without
invoking one or more fallacies.

------
osfp
This is the death of twitter, it will become just another propaganda machine.
People who like propaganda machine will continue to use twitter, people who
don't like propaganda machine will use other microblogging tools instead of
twitter.

~~~
parfe
Wouldn't want to impinge on your free speeches. Dissident dialogue might be
unfairly silenced, such as this comment:
[https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312](https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312)

~~~
makomk
>
> [https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312](https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312)

That's awful and obviously shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, given how
serious rape threats are, you would presumably agree that anyone who _used_
those rape threats to pressure for censorship of political viewpoints they
disagreed with was trivialising rape and should be called out for doing so?

~~~
parfe
Are you saying the victims of rape threats are trivialising rape by expecting
twitter to intervene?

~~~
makomk
No. It is, so far as I know, possible for Twitter to intervene against rape
threats without also engaging in censorship of undesirable political
viewpoints.

