Another day, another twitter storm, this time directed at Caroline Criado-Perez for expressing an option a bunch of sexist trolls didn’t like. No matter how much you disagree with someone’s opinion, rape threats are never, ever acceptable, and it really shouldn’t need explaining why.
I’ve seen one or two people, notably James Desborough, defending the right to troll in the name of freedom of speech. But that ignores the fact that the trolls’ threats are themselves a silencing tactic. If you cannot voice controversial opinions without getting flooded with more threatening posts than you can cope with, then you’re effectively being censored.
But it’s very wrong to claim that there’s any one simple solution. Moderation of any online space (including Twitter) is very, very hard to get right, and far too easy to get horribly wrong. Even successful moderation policies in smaller communities don’t scale to something the size of Twitter. Unfettered freedom of speech can result in a playground for sociopaths where bad speech drives out good, but who gets to decide what’s good and bad?
Twitter’s big problem is flash mobs, when grown adults start acting like playground bullies. Many different groups are guilty of this. There are a lot of parallels on Twitter between the behaviour of clumps of misogynist trogodytes. and what happens when social justice types grab the torches and pitchforks in self-righteous fury. It doesn’t make much difference to the victim whether the mob is motivated by self-righteousness or sexist douchbaggery.
We should be very, very cautious about trying to use a quick technical quick fix for what’s essentially a social problem. It’s next to impossible to construct an automated abuse handling or crowd-based karma system that isn’t going to be gamed by the trolls and used as a weapon against their victims. And human moderation will involve subjective judgement calls which would have to take context into account.
I’m not saying that the status quo is the least bad option, just that we need to treat proposed solutions with caution, and be very wary of unintended consequences or unspoken agendas. I don’t want to live in an online world where people can be harassed and intimidated online, but neither to I want to see a situation where politicians and high profile media figures can shut down any criticism of their policies and views. What do we gain if we cannot call out a bigot for being a bigot?
I note from the BBC website that there has been an arrest.
Yes there has to be freedom of speech, but if that freedom is abused then there have to be consequences.
Given that it should be very easy to archive a log of such a conversation, it ought to be very easy to produce the evidence. Now there is probably a very wide grey area between banter and criminality, but sometimes it is obvious that action needs to be taken.
I find it odd to think that anyone would listen to 50 abusive tweets an hour for 12 hours. I’d have sent the whole lot to a spool file and found something else to do while the pests create all the evidence to hand over to the authorities. Furthermore, anyone behaving in such a fashion in an environment so easily logged deserves to have a big fine, their account suspended and just possibly worse.
If you wouldn’t say it in public don’t tweet it!
Latest report is that somebody has been arrested and bailed until September.