
“A Honeypot for Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment - avolcano
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s?utm_term=.cf9lYYV9zg#.slYMPPojzG
======
MorePowerToYou
The whole "dedication to free speech" mantra is cute, but ultimately just
reeks of a failed bet on how to run the company.

From a technical perspective, letting essentially anyone say anything is
easier to handle. The engineering resources that would otherwise go towards
advanced content filtering and detection, etc can now just focus on making the
platform scale. That works out well when a company is growing like crazy in
the early days.

From a business perspective, the hate-spewing users are "really engaged with
the product." Having a lot of users in this category is a great thing to tell
investors. Also, the growth from these users is something investors like, too.
So it's also a win from a business perspective.

I'm guessing that Twitter's leadership made a decision early on. Something
along the lines of "let's go with the free speech thing for now. It lends
itself to efficient allocation of engineering resources and improving key
metrics." When you're growing as fast as Twitter in the early days, it's not
necessarily a bad choice. However, the current growth stagnation and other
negative issues surrounding the company is really starting to expose the
downsides of that haphazard decision.

------
koolba
There should be a separate domain for buzzfeed's long form articles. I suppose
I could make an anti-listicle filter but having it be explicit would be nicer.

~~~
Fiahil
They should, at least, rebrand themselves. "BuzzFeed" toxicity is so high, I
can't see why they wouldn't get a massive malus for it.

------
greenspot
OT: There are some beeautiful visuals/illustrations around the text

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Aqueous
Twitter is a cesspool, but isn't an open, public conversation between everyone
in the world pretty much guaranteed to be a cesspool? I don't see how you can
stop that from happening without compromising the principle of Twitter itself.

You take on risks when you start announcing your private thoughts to the
widest possible public audience. Those risks go along with being any kind of
public creator. Other than because no one would really be interested in my
tweets anyway, this is precisely the reason why myself and others exercise our
free choice not to tweet. We don't want a trail of statements for which we are
publically held to account, even if by harassers, racists and misogynists, if
we can't - and shouldn't - control the audience for those tweets. If you want
a limited, curated audience, go somewhere else.

~~~
unreal37
Is this forum a cesspool? (No.) Is it an open public conversation by anyone in
the world? (Yes.)

You can have conversations without it becoming a racist, bigoted mess.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
People get banned from here all the time tho and there's plenty of racist
garbage that gets posted.

~~~
nstart
Exactly. HN is a very good definition of a community that's maintained a
significant standard in good communication by using relatively basic tools and
quality community moderation. Twitter could have been this. But they chose to
believe that no moderation would be just fine.

~~~
retox
The post count here is significantly lower than Twitter. I shudder to think
how many moderators it would take to administer Twitter.

You might think that the downvote mechanism here helps somewhat, and it does,
but on any large community with voting such as Reddit the ability to downvote
turns the community into an echo chamber where only the largest group gets a
say and any dissenting voice is vanished. I dare say we see the same thing
here on HN.

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yummyfajitas
The omissions from this article are kind of strange.

For example, it somehow manages to ignore the many harassment campaigns
against various white people (e.g. Justine Sacco, Pax Dickinson, Brandon Eich,
Milo) who's politics don't conform (or based on a single tweet, appear not to
conform) to what is acceptable.

Or it brings up Leslie Jones, but then completely ignores all her racist
tweets and calls for follower to harass others:
[http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-
le...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-leslie-jones-
racist-twitter-history/)

That sure is weird.

[edit: clarified my point better.]

~~~
tptacek
This is a very disingenuous comment. You know well why the article left out
Milo Yiannopoulos and Pax Dicksonson: they're both prominent racist trolls.
You included Justine Sacco and Brandon Eich deliberately in order to draw an
equivalence between them and Yionnopoulous. Obviously, that equivalence is
false. And you conned people, me included, into reading _the dumbest Breitbart
article ever created_. Mercy, mercy, Leslie Jones used the words "white
people"! How-ever does Twitter allow her to keep posting?

Who are you trying to kid? More and more, your comments on HN are becoming a
parody of themselves. You have real arguments to make. I don't _like_ most of
them, but at least I can respect them. This, though, is more horseshit.

~~~
tdkl
Targeted abuse goes both ways:

[https://twitter.com/lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352](https://twitter.com/lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352)

~~~
adekok
For reference, the tweet says:

> @whitebecky1776 bitch I want to tell you about your self but I'm gonna let
> everybody else do it I'm gonna retweet your hate!! Get her!!

And the Twitter rules say:

[https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311](https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311)

> Harassment: You may not incite or engage in the targeted abuse or harassment
> of others. Some of the factors that we may consider when evaluating abusive
> behavior include:

> ...

> if the reported account is inciting others to harass another account;

> ...

Just FYI.

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kelukelugames
I always thought Ashley Judd was the first big harassment story on Twitter.
Here is her account of it. Though I remember it happening earlier than 2015.
Maybe there are multiple incidents.

[https://mic.com/articles/113226/forget-your-team-your-
online...](https://mic.com/articles/113226/forget-your-team-your-online-
violence-toward-girls-and-women-is-what-can-kiss-my-ass#.Pmx00Qq6t)

------
snockerton
If drawing the line on what is and isn't harassment is subjective, perhaps
they should focus on building better mechanisms for individuals to take
filtering / blocking into their own hands? One could argue that Twitter has
these features already, but apparently the "privileged class" (celebrities)
are incapable of leveraging them?

~~~
retox
I don't use Twitter, never have, but I don't understand why the platform
doesn't have a whitelist mode, where only those people you've added to a list
can message you. Seems like it would sort the problem for good, but I'm
probably missing something.

~~~
breischl
I'm in the same boat as you on Twitter usage. But I suspect it's because being
able to talk at anybody, including celebrities, is part of the appeal of the
platform. The whitelisting mode you suggested makes it more like a one-way
broadcast - you can see what people are saying but not join in.

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EddieSpeaks
Depends on what people decide IS harassment, in this survey
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37025554](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37025554)
52% of women said unwelcome jokes heard years ago amounted to harassment.

who objectively decides what is and isn't?

~~~
nstart
I think the people getting abused have a fair amount of say in what's abusive
and what's not. Working conditions/scenarios from years ago might be
considered unwelcome today. That doesn't make my negative feeling towards a
"work 8 hours a day for 35 years in one company and retire" scenario invalid.
Your question however IS the problem. Sure there are a lot of messages that
straddle a fine line between abuse, jokes, and not at all abuse. But people
have quite collectively agreed that rape threats are a form of abuse. That
doxxing is a form of abuse. But the attitude towards even these kinds of
obvious forms of abuse has remained flippant at best because instead of
catching the low hanging fruit, people counter with bike shedding style
questions of "is it really abuse?". The problem here honestly is a simple case
of not wanting to listen hard enough.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_I think the people getting abused have a fair amount of say in what 's
abusive and what's not._

This is circular reasoning.

If I can define X as abusive (where X is something I don't like), then I am a
person getting abused. So now that allows me to define whatever I want as
abusive?

~~~
breischl
That's a near-perfect example of what the GP was referring to with "...instead
of catching the low hanging fruit, people counter with bike shedding style
questions of 'is it really abuse?'"

And while I get your point about circularity, it pretty much has to be that
way. For example, if I threatened to stab a random person with a syringe, that
would be abusive. If I threatened to stab my brother with a syringe, that's an
inside joke from when we used to play "Battlefield Vietnam" together.

Which is pretty much what the article was getting at when they talked about
context mattering more than content.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_That 's a near-perfect example of what the GP was referring to with
"...instead of catching the low hanging fruit, people counter with bike
shedding style questions of 'is it really abuse?'"_

Ok, in that case lets also catch the low hanging fruit of black men raping
white women. And if you say "a black man asking out a girl who doesn't like
him isn't rape" then you are guilty of bikeshedding. <\- Spot the fallacy yet?

If circularity is valid then as a victim I define names that start with "brei"
to be harassment. You can tell I'm a victim because someone with a name
starting with "brei" replied to me, which makes this valid. <\- Spot the
fallacy yet?

Consider the possibility that if you can't prove your point without
deliberately resorting to logical fallacies, that your point might be wrong.

~~~
breischl
Yes, clearly one can construct ridiculous examples. On the other hand, one can
also ignore clearly valid cases while trying to construct the perfect
solution. Sometimes the real world involves solutions that are merely
acceptable. Or even individual judgement calls - hence why we have judges and
juries.

But since you seem to think that there is a fully-cohesive, non-circular,
objective way to judge what is harassment or abuse, please enlighten me as to
what it is.

If you fail to do so, then somebody will probably rape and kill your entire
family. <\-- Not abusive, because there isn't a peer-reviewed Theory of Abuse
available.

edit: Just for the hard-of-sarcasm, the last bit is to illustrate the
ridiculousness of the argument, not an actual threat.

------
SurrealSoul
The internet will always have trolls and always had trolls. Twitter as a
platform doesn't do anything differently than the old IIRCs or forums when it
comes to this.

It's that whole people behind an anonymous screen are assholes because they
can thing.

~~~
masklinn
> The internet will always have trolls and always had trolls.

Humanity has always lived on subsistence and never flown, until it fixed those
things.

> Twitter as a platform doesn't do anything differently than the old IIRCs or
> forums when it comes to this.

The vast majority of forums I've used had responsive moderators and the
ability to remove trolls (including correlating concurrent or sequential
sockpuppets and reapplying sanctions on new accounts). IRC tends to be more
spartan, but even there you could require authentication, autokick abusers and
ban IPs.

Of course both were intended as _communities_ (of sorts) not trying to sell
their growth, so removing a bunch of assholes wasn't considered an issue by
anyone.

