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.
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.
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.
To be honest I don't think the problem is twitter. Twitter was founded and run by free-speech crusaders. It provides a platform for people to say what they wish, period.
It's the expectations we've projected on twitter. A forum for anonymous messaging run by people who believe in free speech is NOT an appropriate place for an online presence as a celebrity or business. You really shouldn't tie it to your real name. It's perfectly fine for there to exist 4chan/twitter-esque cesspools of hate and wretched abuse at every turn. It's not perfectly fine for people to, as part of their job, log into thousands of racist hate-spewing garbage messages targeted at them every day, or have their online identity plastered with it.
This is the kind of place that twitter is. Some are sheltered from the storm and don't notice it. Partly because you aren't the target audience for random acts of hate (maybe you're a white male in tech), and mostly because you just haven't gotten unlucky enough to attract the attention of certain hordes of hate spewing monsters. But if you use twitter to network, you're diving into the cesspool. If you invite others to network with you on twitter, you're inviting them to do the same. If you post a twitter account as part of your online presence, you're broadcasting to the world "yup, I'm part of this".
And that's a real problem for twitter. You can't have both unrestrained free speech and civilized communication.
I'm going to defer to the people that say that the cesspool aspect of it all is actually harmful. And no, I don't mean that Stacy is, like, omg, such a bitch. Or that 14 year old /b/tards are brigading some corporate account with gore and porn.
I mean the actual harmful harassment. The article mentioned that one of the co-stars of the new Ghostbusters quit online media due to the cesspool, but there are many many more instances of people taking the endless microphone of online social media and making it horrible. Though it is incredibly rare, some people are in fact driven to suicide due to the targeted harassment.
Now we can debate facts and the amount of thickness your skin should be until the Zuck finally kicks the bucket. But the point I want to make is that sometimes the cesspool gets away from itself and steps over some invisible line into true harassment that can't be defended to a lot of people as simple freedom of speech (lawyers assemble!). I love that we have freedom of speech in this country, and I know that it is not meant for the things that you or I like to hear and that it is explicitly for the lowlifes and assholes to say what they want to. Still, I don't know where that line is, but I do know that it gets crossed a lot; and that from the media I consume, the line tends to be crossed a lot more if you are female or black.
So, I'll defer to the people that have been bitten by the cesspool, as I have not been in their shoes and have had to stare at their phones while hate comes blasting in and all they are trying to do is order a pizza. If a lot of the people that have had these experiences say that Twitter et al need to be better, then I think I have to trust them.
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.
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.
I would argue that this site is not quite public in the same sense that Twitter is. Sure - anyone can register and post comments and articles, but the community of this site is extremely self-selected to those with a specific domain of knowledge.
Except Twitter don't want that either - as evidenced by their unannounced censoring of certain AMA sessions, and panicked deletions of trolls of famous celebrities. It turns out that they are just another company driven by commercial demands.
I imagine if there was competition and a "Twitter but with anti-trolling mechanisms" network sprung up most people, and the vast majority of women and ethnic minorities would flock to that network.
Yet no such site exists. Probably because 'anti trolling mechanisms' would mean banning people who are claimed by others to be trolls, and that'd quickly result in nearly everyone being banned. Especially a social network dominated by women! Ye gods, have you ever heard women talk about each other behind their backs? The idea that trolling and abuse is an exclusively white male behaviour is ridiculous.
> "You take on risks when you start announcing your private thoughts to the widest possible public audience."
I think the point is that these risks are unevenly distributed. When I announce my thoughts on Twitter my risk is lower by virtue of the fact that I'm a dude, I'm straight, or any number of other qualifiers. It's not that no one experiences any risks when announcing themselves in public, it's that the risk is dramatically and severely unevenly distributed.
The unequal distribution of risk (and consequently, the unequal distribution of vitriol) is IMO the entire point of the article, and has two main takeaways:
- This results in some demographics experiencing relatively little abuse, and therefore assume a proportionally larger share of the conversation as those who experience high abuse quit.
- The system, by virtue of the fact that it's built mostly by people who experience low-risk when using it, is in a large way blind to high-risk members of its population, and will not develop the necessary tools to combat abuse (see also: Reddit).
> "If you want a limited, curated audience, go somewhere else."
This is very, very evidently happening. Twitter's user growth has stalled, its total user base has plateaued, despite competing social networks continuing to grow rapidly. There are, of course, more than enough anecdotes of both high- and low-profile users fleeing the platform due to abuse, and the aggregate numbers reflect this.
It's also worth noting that the younger generation has overwhelmingly chosen social networks with either more limited audiences, or more abuse management tools (see: Snapchat, Instagram).
The market is speaking, though it makes me wonder if some middle ground was possible - a "public announcement" social network where the most extreme ends of the abuse spectrum could be contained. Twitter fulfills a valuable niche, and there is a certain amount of sadness that it's really not working out.
I really don't think the kind of people who are being abusive on Twitter stop and evaluate the race or gender of who they're attacking before they do so. There's plenty of nasty tweeting directed towards white males on Twitter. If you can prove that such people get less abuse in a scientific way, go for it.
I think the main difference is they tend not to start campaigns to systematically 'sanitise' Twitter nor claim to speak on behalf of their entire race/gender. They deal with it in different, much quieter ways.
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.
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.
> 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;
In the interest of facts, can you point out where these people have said racist things on Twitter?
Dismissing them as "racist trolls" is a bit odd. Milo is a well known journalist, who doesn't seem much worse in his way than any other muck-racking person going after views.
In which they claim that un-named people have engaged in racist baiting of Leslie Jones. And that those people are believed (for reasons un-named) to be Milo's followers. And that Milo is on record as not denouncing those people. And therefore Milo should be banned from Twitter for being a racist troll.
If Milo violated Twitters terms of service, then by all means show which inappropriate tweet(s) Milo made.
Otherwise, does no one really see a problem with such a tenuous chain of logic behind banning him?
None of those harassment campaigns were initiated because the targets were white, they were because of specific things they had said or causes they had supported. Which doesn't mean they deserve the abuse of course, but it's not really salient to the issue of certain groups of twitter users regularly and disproportionately receiving abuse because of their race/sex/religion/etc.
Leslie Jones calling out 'white people' is not racism. Black Americans expressing negative sentiments about white Americans is definitionally different from racism. I wouldn't say it's necessarily the most productive way to challenge white supremacy, but it's not of a piece with the centuries old and still strong system of dehumanizing, oppressing and killing people of a specific race in America.
> Black Americans expressing negative sentiments about white Americans is definitionally different from racism.
No, its not.
> I wouldn't say it's necessarily tasteful on Jones' part, but it's not of a piece with the centuries old and still strong system of dehumanizing, oppressing and killing people of a specific race in America.
That doesn't mean that its "definitionally different from racism", that just means its not an aspect of a particular course of racism.
Ideally, we want to call out and stop racism before it manifests in a course like that, rather than only afterwards. (Which is not to say that a course with that history, and the kind of continuation that anti-black racism in the US still has, is not a more significant concern -- just that racism doesn't become racism only after it has successfully managed to justify generations of crimes against humanity.)
Yes, it is. This is the crux of what most white Americans don't get about race in America. Anti-black racism originated from a thesis of racial inferiority. The anti-white "racism" the Breitbart article cites clearly doesn't have a founding thesis that "white people are inherently inferior". It's actually just a critique of the myriad ways white 'culture' perpetuates anti-black (and anti anything but straight white male) sentiments and beliefs. Certainly, I don't think pithy tweets are the best way to advance these critiques, but they're not being written for the benefit of cerebral tech bros like us, they're being written to offer some relief and solidarity for others whose lives are materially affected by white bullshit.
> This is the crux of what most white Americans don't get about race in America.
Having spent much of my childhood being called a "nigger" by White Americans (and some, though less, being called a "zebra" or "oreo" by Black Americans), I really don't need any lectures from anyone about what "most White Americans" don't get about race in America.
And while there are certainly many things that many (or even most) White Americans don't get about race in America, what some (but, IME and AFAICT more generally, not most) Black Americans (and, even more paternalistic white-knighting White Americans) don't get is that negative racial stereotyping both is and promotes racism no matter the race of the proponent of the stereotype or the race targeted by the stereotype.
EDIT: I wanted to add a comment on this:
> Certainly, I don't think pithy tweets are the best way to advance these critiques, but they're not being written for the benefit of cerebral tech bros like us, they're being written to offer some relief and solidarity for others whose lives are materially affected by white bullshit.
The fact that a racist utterance provides some relief to an audience that has had negative experiences doesn't make it any less racist. Heck, one of the main uses of anti-black racism by white economic and political elites in the US has been to offer some relief and (illusion of) solidarity to poorer white Americans suffering from adverse conditions by directing the blame at blacks in general.
I apologize. I see that I've made wrong assumptions here.
You're right, racial stereotyping of any kind is bad; I was wrong to argue otherwise. I got on my paternalistic white-knighting horse because I made the (racist?) assumption that you were white, and I'm inclined to argue against other white people accusing others of racism. I guess it comes from my own toxic white guilt. But is it a completely wrongheaded impulse, to try to police other white people who are trying to argue that American racism goes equally both ways? That's what the Breitbart article is implying, that Jones was being just as toxic as Milo, isn't it? My argument that anti-white racism is definitionally impossible may be overly radical, but don't you have to somewhere take account of the fact that anti-white racism doesn't have nearly the same material impact on it's targets and isn't really a structural part of political and economic systems in America?
> But is it a completely wrongheaded impulse, to try to police other white people who are trying to argue that American racism goes equally both ways?
It is not wrongheaded to attempt to counter arguments that the harms from being targeted by racism [0] in America are equally distributed among racial groups, I would agree.
> My argument that anti-white racism is definitionally impossible may be overly radical, but don't you have to somewhere take account of the fact that anti-white racism doesn't have nearly the same material impact on it's targets and isn't really a structural part of political and economic systems in America?
Sure, but I think that there is both a problem with any concept of "racism" that goes so far as to say it is not racism (as I discuss more in my response to your post discussing your use of such a definition) and, more tactically, that simply calling anti-white racism "not racism" does more to obscure, rather than effectively addresses, why and how there are significant differences, in the present circumstances that exist in the US, in the impacts of anti-white vs. anti-black racism (which I think you identify quite well.)
[0] I was going to say "harms from racism", but given that there are many ways in which (among other non-blacks) poor whites are harmed by anti-black racism manipulated by elites, the harms from racism are probably at least more equally distributed than the direct harms from being targeted by racism are, and the latter is, really, I think the issue of concern here.
No, what the article is implying is that Twitter doesn't actually follow their stated principle of banning people who incite harassment. Instead, Twitter just uses that as a cheap excuse to ban people they don't like while ignoring it when people they do like engage in the same behavior.
I.e., twitter isn't against harassment, they are just against Milo and vague hints of harassment are a convenient excuse.
Note that under definition #1 black people can be racist against white people. Under definition #2 that's not possible, because black people are (or at the very least historically have been) oppressed.
I have seen #2 used to make categorical statements like "black people can't be racist." Which may not be an Orwellian dystopia as @adekok said in a sibling comment, but it is inflammatory to people using definition #1.
I appreciate you clarifying this distinction. I was aware that I was using a non-normative definition that comes from radical leftist intellectual discourse, and I should have been more clear that I was presenting an alternative understanding of the term. I guess #2 is more readily understood in mainstream discourse under the term "structural racism".
> I was aware that I was using a non-normative definition that comes from radical leftist intellectual discourse
The problem with this definition is that it conflates racism -- which is problematic in any case -- with an external condition which interacts with racism and makes it more damaging (and, worse, it treats that external condition -- which in reality is a continuously-valued property -- as binary.)
By doing so it obstructs discussion of the continuum of problems associated with racism and serves to normalize some racism (which may be less harmful racism in the conditions in which it originates, but as those conditions change for what would otherwise be the better, becomes more harmful without the actual content of the racism changing.)
It also has the additional unfortunate side effect that people more distantly following the theorists adopting such a radical definition pick up the conclusion "Black people can't be racist" and lose the context of the understanding of the conditions justifying, in the particular definition the theorists are applying, why negative racial stereotyping of whites by blacks isn't racism, and just taking it as a categorical privilege of blacks (regardless of their position and privilege in a particular milieu) to engage in racial stereotyping and discrimination, because "black people can't be racist".
> This is the crux of what most white Americans don't get about race in America.
The dictionary definition of racism would be the one most people agree with. Which then means that black people making anti-white statements are being racist.
The alternative is an Orwellian dystopia in which the meaning of words depends on who says them.
> ... they're being written to offer some relief and solidarity for others whose lives are materially affected by white bullshit.
Which is itself a racist comment according to the dictionary definition. Engaging in racism in order to stop racism means that you're no better than the racists you oppose.
I'm firmly of the belief that the ends don't justify the means. The means help determine the end.
To that end, we all should oppose racism. All racism. And not just oppose racism by people we don't like, and support racism by people we like.
What point are you trying to make? Are you implying that the tweets Breitbart links to don't exist, by virtue of existing on Breitbart?
If there is true information that is being reported only by certain sources, it is perhaps worth thinking about why. See this article by Freddy Deboer on that topic:
"People who gleefully trashed Justine Sacco complain about pile-ons; people who say doxing is wrong get others fired from their real-life jobs. There are no principles; there’s only who you’re cool with and who you aren’t."
For what its worth, You may disagree with Milo's style but the substance of his comments on the ghost busters is real and its proven the way at the box office, where Sony will not make its money back and they have canceled a planned sequel and animation movies.
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.
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?
The article explicitly calls out their lack of product development as hindering the process. The example given is of a feature they've been discussing for 5 years(!) where it would favour displaying replies made by individuals the original tweeter follows.
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.
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.
Depends on what people decide IS harassment, in this survey http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37025554 52% of women said unwelcome jokes heard years ago amounted to harassment.
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.
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?
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.
It's not "bike shedding". Bikeshed painting is a term for discussions where the outcome doesn't matter, often started to give management a feeling that they're in control and being involved.
Pointing out that "abuse is whatever an abused person defines it as" is an argument built on quicksand is very much not bikeshedding.
Well to be fair, I didn't say that abuse is fully defined by the abuse. Just that the abused have a fair amount of say. This is very different. Couple that with the statement of things that can be easily and objectively defined as abusive and we have a group of people who can easily be put in to an objectively defined bucket of abuse. This is the group that can further share their experiences which lets anyone who's willing to listen hard enough, to qualitatively identify/define how abuse is happening. Or at least attempt to.
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.
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.
Ah, so you'd just like distract everyone from the big, obvious problems by arguing endlessly over minor details without offering a solution to your objections, an idea about where one might find a solution, or even if a solution is possible.
Which is exactly the bikeshedding that @nstart referred to about 6 posts ago. Thanks for yet another near-perfect example.
I think you ignored breischl's point, which was about context mattering. That is, you can't treat the claim as a logical proposition alone in the universe.
I'm not disputing that context can provide information about an action, I'm disputing the need to use circular reasoning/appeals to emotion rather than clear objective principles.
Whilst that may be the case that isn't anything close to what the article is talking about. Discussion about content v context automated filtering, and training filters for specific AMAs with Obama and Jenner demonstrate that there is an objective level that has been used in specific instances.
There is a vast amount of abuse of Twitter to be dealt with long before we get into any territory where subjectivity is required.
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.
> 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.
Those generally had moderators. And people in one channel didn't have to deal with trolls in another channel. Twitter rarely does anything about abusive users, and everyone is thrown into one conversation (there's no way to even block hashtags).
I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that a) racist and sexist abuse are a thing which b) in the US and other western countries white men experience rarely, by virtue of being neither women nor belonging to an ethnic minority group.
That doesn't mean that all white men are to blame for such abuse, and it's fallacious of you to claim the article is advocating that. It's also super important for us white dudes to consider that the volume of such abuse we see ourselves is much lower, because we are not targets of it. You gotta give weight to other people's reported experience, too.
If the majority of the abusers fall into class X and target class Y, and your goal is to explain or stop this behaviour, then that is informationally relevant, yeah.
This does not imply that all or indeed a majority of all members of class X are abusers. (And more importantly, this article doesn't go anywhere near making that claim.)
Not all victims of abuse are black or women, but black women get a disproportionate amount of abuse. Should be ignore that, too? How do we hope to provide systemic solutions if we ignore such important data?
That sounds an awful lot like profiling to me, and the social narrative is that profiling is wrong and immoral. Or is it ok to profile as long as you are profiling someone you perceive to be a member of a privileged class? I have a hard time keeping the rules straight.
The straight white men who (largely) built and run Twitter failed to manage harassment on the service. Presumably they just don't think it's a big problem because they don't see it. They have actually admitted this a few times. http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-me...
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.