Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter is in trouble again, with another major round of layoffs after a number of potential buyers backed away.

There’s a lot of evidence of simple bad management, too many people with jobs that added too little value. But it’s also being said that Twitter’s ongoing failure to tackle trolls, bullying and harassment on their network was a significant negative factor for some would-be buyers.

It’s been an ongoing problem for a long time, and Twitter’s response has always been a case of too little too late. Banning a handful of medium profile right-wing figures “pour encourager les autres” is not a practical solution, and probably only serves to make matters worse.

What Twitter really needs is a clear and unambiguous Terms of Service, which is then enforced consistently and transparently. Such a thing would force everyone from GamerGaters to social justice witch-hunters to play by the same rules, which would surely be a good thing.

Cynically there’s the suspicion that Jack Dorsey is too close to some social justice witch hunters to be willing to implement anything that might cramp their style. So the harassment is allowed to continue, and their current TOS continues to be enforced in a selective and partisan way that benefits no-one. Much of the worst behaviour goes unpunished unless their target is a prominent member of a group Twitter’s management wants to curry favour with.

Have the technical solutions that have been proposed, many of them quite straightforward to implement, been squelched for the same reason? Or can we simply blame cluelessness?

Twitter at its best is a great conversation space and a great way of making new social and professional connections. But its weakness has always the way trolls can disrupt meaningful conversation. Twitter have been dragging their heels on this for far too long.

I am glad I made the decision several years back to continue maintaining this blog rather than abandoning blogging in favour of social media as many others did. I own this domain, and in the unlikely event of the current hosting company going bad on me, I can move to another host.

Recent events in Twitter point to a disturbing trend, and show the perils of relying on a company you have no control over for the entirety of your online presence.

Now I know Twitter has a harassment and bullying problem, and the company has been unacceptably slow in dealing with it. I’ve said before the best solution is far better blocking and muting functionality rather than centralised moderation. But that doesn’t seem to be the way they’re going.

The suspension of Whores of Yore (now reinstated), and the shadowbanning of St.Rev point yet again to a moderation policy that’s entirely arbitrarily and lacks any kind of transparency. While I know any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, you can’t help feeling that Twitter’s rules are deliberately vague and selectively enforced for a reason. Under Jack Dorsey’s leadership Twitter has taken an increasingly left-authoritarian turn and abandoned previous commitments to free expression.

Are they deliberately trying to make Twitter a more hostile place for people who do not share the right politics, either to force them to self-censor or to abandon Twitter in favour of smaller free-speech ghettos?

Now, Whores of Yore does post some rather rude images, but those are explicitly permitted on Twitter provided they’re appropriately labelled as for adults only. And St Rev is a robust libertarian who doesn’t have much time for the left. But I’ve seen no evidence that either of them are guilty of violations of Twitter’s terms of service. Certainly no signs of targeted harassment of individuals. What is going on?

According to JestersCourt, Twitter can fix Twitter with just a few lines of code

I don’t have inside knowledge of Twitter’s architecture, and so can’t really comment on whether a “few lines of code” is accurate, but the essence is this: When someone blocks you for whatever reason, you can’t @mention them in a Tweet. Whether you get an error, or it’s just silently deleted, the Tweet will go nowhere and won’t be seen by your followers.

That fixes the biggest single aspect of Twitter’s harassment problem, when someone with a large bully pulpit sets their followers on someone who’s incurred their wrath.

Unless there’s a flaw in the solution I haven’t see, it’s hard to see why Twitter doesn’t just go ahead in implement something along these lines. You’re forced to suspect that Jack Dorsey is less interested in solving Twitter’s actual problems than he is currying favour with particular activist cliques.  In other words, virtual signalling trumps positive action.

The problem with Jester’s Court’s solution is it’s politically neutral. The same mechanism that would stop racist and sexist trolls would also damp down the witch hunts popular in social-justice circles. And because that would cramp the style of the people Jack Dorsey wants to curry favour with, it’s a non-starter; they have a weird “punching up/punching down” dynamic where it’s only defined as harassment if it’s a member of their outgroup targetting a member of their ingroup.

So instead Twitter seem to be going down the route of top-down content politicng and filtering by keywords known to be popular with outgroups. What could possibly go wrong?

Twitter hashtag activism is completely useless.

Hashtags are great fun for quick-fire humour, like the running joke hashtags that always seem to take off on Friday afternoons when people are bored at work. That’s the sort of thing that shows Twitter at its best. But when it comes to dealing with sensitive and nuanced topics, the 140 character limit is worse than useless.

There’s little point singling out any one hasttag in particular, because every single one plays out the same way, and you get that sinking feeling the moment one appears and the usual suspects start using it. They start out with what usually comes over as self-righteous in-group signalling. Then comes the inevitable angry backlash from those who distrust the agenda of whoever it was that started the tag. It spirals down in an all-too-predictable fashion of insults and name-calling, splitting communities along existing faultlines and making everyone bar the hardcore culture warriors miserable. It’s Twitter at it’s very worst. If we’re really unlucky it ends with risible hack-written clickbait hitpieces on sites like Salon, Breitbart and The Guardian.

Since these hashtags achieve nothing other than sowing discord, the only sensible response is to shoot them on sight using a client that lets you mute hashtags.