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“A Honeypot for Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment
- greenspot 10y agoOT: There are some beeautiful visuals/illustrations around the text
- dominotw 10y agotldr: it's white men's fault > Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man, > If Twitter had people in the room who’d been abused on the internet — meaning not just straight, white males — when they were creating the company, I can assure you the service would be different. >multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern. >A 2015 Women, Action, and the Media study revealed that, as of 2014, Twitter’s leadership was 79% male and 72% white
- _petronius 10y agoI 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.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that a) racist and sexist abuse are a thing I understand that "racism" and "sexism" are things without mention of and/or blaming "straight, white men". >that the volume of such abuse we see ourselves is much lower I'm not sure how the fact that because specific demographics witness fewer abuses they should somehow be assumed to be part of the problem.
- sp332 10y agoThe 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-memo-taking-personal-responsibility-for-the http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-me... https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/695824384594808832 https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/695824384594808832 & https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/695834826432065536 https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/695834826432065536
- choko 10y agoIf all white men are not to blame, then there's really no need to point out that the abusers are straight, white, and male.
- _petronius 10y agoIf 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?
- choko 10y agoThat 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.
- runjake 10y agoIronically, and somewhat of a trend with these kinds of articles, the author is a white male.
- kelukelugames 10y agoWhy is it ironic? When it comes to gender based harassment, men are more likely to listen to each other instead of women.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sievebrain 10y agoBecause everyone knows that white males are never assholes to each other on the internet? Thanks for summarising the article - good to know I can skip it without missing anything.
- EddieSpeaks 10y agoDepends 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 10y agoI 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 10y agoI 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 10y agoThat'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.
- SurrealSoul 10y agoThe 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 10y ago> 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.
- cmdkeen 10y agoFrom TFA: "She deleted the tweet and posted the image to Instagram where she doesn't get abuse" So Instagram clearly does something differently, and from the perspective of at least one person, better.
- TorKlingberg 10y agoWhile not specific to Twitter, organized online harassment/bullying is a somewhat new phenomenon. Usenet and forums mostly had individual trolls.
- sp332 10y agoThose 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).
- yummyfajitas 10y agoThe 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-leslie-jones-racist-twitter-history/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-le... That sure is weird. [edit: clarified my point better.]
- kelukelugames 10y agos
- WhitneyLand 10y ago>Twitter is discriminatory against whites. Citations please.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- benten10 10y agoAhh breitbart. The only honest, independent, impartial, and non-sellout media remaining. Everyone else is MSM-shill. /s
- eugeneionesco 10y agoSo you're saying that article is not impartial? Please provide proof.
- sremani 10y agoFor 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.
- koolba 10y agoThere 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 10y agoThey should, at least, rebrand themselves. "BuzzFeed" toxicity is so high, I can't see why they wouldn't get a massive malus for it.
- kelukelugames 10y agoI 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-violence-toward-girls-and-women-is-what-can-kiss-my-ass#.Pmx00Qq6t https://mic.com/articles/113226/forget-your-team-your-online...
- snockerton 10y agoIf 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 10y agoI 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 10y agoI'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.
- cmdkeen 10y agoThe 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.
- Aqueous 10y agoTwitter 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.
- cmdkeen 10y agoExcept 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.
- sievebrain 10y agoYet 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- unreal37 10y agoIs 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.
- MorePowerToYou 10y agoThe 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.