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Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem

160 points by dsr12 8y ago

danso 8y ago
The problem is "massive" in the way that Instagram itself is massive, and having a public account opens you up to a massive attack surface (i.e. the global, growing audience of Instagram and the Internet at-large). As in the case with Facebook and Twitter, there's only so much a social network can do without putting real controls on who can create an account and who can participate: > Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves—by muting replies from people who don’t follow you, who you don’t follow, aren’t verified, haven’t confirmed an email address, and more—Instagram has only implemented some of these controls. Instagram had a nicer overall "personality" to it initially because it was centered around the posting of attractive, innocuous photos. But in the end, it's still a platform that allows anyone to disseminate information of any kind (not just comments, but screenshots and images of text memes), so there's no reason to think that as it becomes massively mainstream, it won't have the exact same problems as Facebook and Twitter. edit: fixed grammar
village-idiot 8y ago
I think social media operators are under-valuing the risk that harassment has to their organizations. Social media companies live and die by the network effect. New social sites sometimes hit a magic threshold point after which they take off like a rocket as "everyone" is on it. Dying social sites drop below that same point, after which it's a "ghost town", and usership falls flat. There are all kinds of things that can cause that to happen, famously redesigns and changes to moderator actions has done it in the past. But in general having a continuously shitty experience as people harass you is a pretty compelling reason to not use a social site. I cannot help but wonder if enough people will leave to trigger a mass exit or not.
peterwwillis 8y ago
*Humanity Has a Massive Harassment Problem FTFY
- seany 8y ago
  Maybe it isn't actually that big of a problem?
  - untog 8y ago
    Maybe it is?
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Internet crazies waiting for you at your home or place of employment, most definitely is a problem. Internet crazies swatting you because you got a portafort in fortnite, or some equally trivial offense like that, most definitely is a problem. And that's not even getting into the more sinister stuff that the fbi has to deal with.
    - tomp 8y ago
      Then surely the problem isn't harrassment, but assault? Also, if you put enough information online, all it takes is one crazy/creepy stalker/murderer to track you down and do anything, that's completely orthogonal to the general problem of "online harrassment".
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        >Then surely the problem isn't harrassment, but assault?... Woah, woah, woah. I said internet crazies showing up at your place of employment is a problem. That doesn't make it assault. For instance, the outrage brigade might show up to protest in front of the company where you work for a few weeks. This is their right as Americans, and I realize and acknowledge that. At the same time, I believe it is harassment. I didn't say we should do anything to stop it. I only said that it most definitely is a problem. And if it happened to you, I'd bet that right around the time your boss called you into his or her office to give you your final paycheck, you would start to think it is a problem too. I think you went about 5 bridges WAY too far with calling a lot of that harassment "assault". A lot of the harassment is not assault. That's why it's so hard to stop. The assault stuff is the stuff that the fbi would be called in on generally speaking.
dickinson99 8y ago
Close the tab, app, etc. Walk away from the computer.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Bit hard to do when they're calling your work, visiting your house, swatting you, etc.
  - izzydata 8y ago
    Posting identifiable information on the internet should never be done. Perhaps middle schools and high schools need to teach kids about the dangers of the internet.
    - jnty 8y ago
      This is literally the definition of victim blaming.
      - jm__87 8y ago
        How else would you avoid people identifying who you are online, other than not posting any identifiable information? If you post your home address and phone number on Facebook and people start prank calling you in the middle of the night and sending pizzas to your house, is Facebook really to blame here?
        macintux 8y ago
        It is extremely difficult to avoid leaking information somewhere, as others have pointed out. Eventually there's a trail. People often (or at least used to) share their current location on Twitter without having any idea they were doing it. Venmo payments default to public, again something that people often don't know. And often it's not you who leaks the information but someone you know. Good luck controlling the social media presence of everyone in your family and circle of friends.
liftbigweights 8y ago
Then stop using instagram. What's with nytimes, theatlantic and the rest of the media and their endless spam and whining about social media? If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone. HN has a massive nytimes, theatlantic, etc spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter useless clickbait media. If the "journalist" at theatlantic don't like instagram, go start your own version of "nice" instagram and make billions.
- untog 8y ago
  > Leave HN alone. You realise these things appear because HN users submit them, and other HN users upvote them?
- danso 8y ago
  Instagram is part of one of the world’s largest tech companies, which makes most of its money by having people freely use and live on its service. Considering its user base is in the hundreds of millions, this makes it a company worth covering by news organizations. Your comment is as inane and oblivious as me telling you to stop whining about The Atlantic, because it’s free and if you don’t like what you see you should just log off.
- tantalor 8y ago
  Then stop using HN. What's with liftbigweights and their endless spam and whining about interesting, on-topic submissions? If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone. liftbigweights has a massive HN spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter trolls. If the "user" at liftbigweights don't like HN, go start your own version of "nice" HN and make billions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
marcodave 8y ago
"... Instagram enables easy sign up via just an email address" Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users? I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity. Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact
- danso 8y ago
  IIRC, virtually every service just requires an email address, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve found that Twitter now quickly throttles any dummy accounts I make by requiring a phone number. But obviously, there’s huge downsides to requiring a phone number.
- bearcobra 8y ago
  Requiring confirmation with an SMS code seems like a reasonable step to tie accounts to a more permanent identifier which can then be used for moderation.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    For a nominal fee, one can get a burner phone/account to sign up for any number of sites. It does very little to de-anonymize someone.
    - GavinMcG 8y ago
      But it does a lot to weed out the many harassers who aren't that motivated.
    - scott_s 8y ago
      It doesn't de-anonymize someone, but it's a much bigger hurdle than an email address, which is free and someone can get on a whim. More friction could curb troll accounts.
wgerard 8y ago
Bringing this to a top-level comment: People wildly underestimate how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely. Even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2]. Once it's out (and spoiler alert, it's out), "stepping away from the computer" is no longer an option. The article describes in detail how it transitions from online to real-life harassment: Swatting, stopping by your personal residence, calling your work, calling your friends and family, etc. Yes, it happens to people of moderate means and very minor celebrity. Yes, you can suffer physical harm or death as a result [3]. Yes, we should also try and solve the swatting problem from the police side as well. 1: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-location/ https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-l... 2: Equifax 3: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affidavit/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affi...
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Actually, if anyone pays any attention to Chines online space, "human flesh search" has been working for over a decade since the early dawn of the mass adoption of Internet in China. The moral of the story is that no matter how careful one protect their identity, they always leak more than they thought they are leaking.
- reggieband 8y ago
  Reminds me of a video [1] posted by Tom Scott from "Things you might not know" youbtube. He and a friend posted a photo of themselves watching the eclipse somewhere in the USA and it is scary how accurately their location was found by Internet sleuths. I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet. There are some freaky good stalkers out there. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ
  - girst 8y ago
    Also from Tom Scott: "I know what you did five minutes ago" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVBshcN7wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVBshcN7wU
jerf 8y ago
I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes. I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free. [1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Is the solution more anonymity, or less? Are reputation systems a good idea in general? On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more. In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill. The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    The solution is to disable communication by default. Nobody can post anything to any feed on anyone's profile, nor send any private message, unless they are in the list of approved users. To get linked, you initiate a the "add me to your group" request. This request is just a flag which asserts "X is interested in linking with Y". It cannot be repeatedly asserted, and no text or images may be attached to it. (If someone wants to harass you with these contact requests, they will have to keep creating new profiles, and fill those profiles themselves with hateful content targeting you.) The system could use Bayesian filtering on profile content to determine which kinds of accounts you don't like linking with.
tomp 8y ago
I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).
- danso 8y ago
  Twitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-... https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listening-problem-accdf6277b88 https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...
  - criddell 8y ago
    My favorite user blocklist was the one that listed every Twitter advertiser. I think the maintainer shut it down, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Ideally companies/platforms would provide first-class support for them, and even urge the users to choose their own after they sign up! Wil Wheaton isn't a platform, he's a private user, and it's not entirely unironic that he "got" what he was promoting for others (being de-platformed)...
monksy 8y ago
For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. (It's harder to navigate and participate in compared to say reddit or fb) I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity. What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
- tracker1 8y ago
  I agree, to an extent. When people invite celebrity status, there will always follow trolls. It simply doesn't matter how great you are. And many don't have the stability and coping systems to deal with it. In saying this, I'm definitely not saying I do... I take a lot of things far more personally than intended, and can only try to not let my instincts drive me when I do. It isn't easy to be on the receiving side of things... that said, I don't think outright censorship is the answer. Couldn't this kid report/block other users on the system giving him grief? Also, for those blocked, probably shouldn't indicate that they've been blocked. I've always found it funny that on Twitter, when someone blocks you, you can no longer see their public profile and tweets. It'd be far better to allow you to see it, but only the blocked see their own retweets/replies. I don't think the people making decisions always think through their decisions. The problem with something like this drawing attention and potentially reacting too quickly is the chance to make things worse is far more likely than actually approving anything.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  > For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. You seem to be pretty out of the loop when it comes to Instagram's primary user group. Many teens/early 20s these days don't even have a computer, a smartphone is all they use. They're definitely accustomed to phone UIs. > I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. Don't generalize from a single datapoint, especially when that datapoint is not a representative sample at all. > What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it). This is just straightforward victim blaming without even trying to understand what is actually going on.
Animats 8y ago
Harassment is mostly a problem because of anonymity. Facebook has a point with their "real names" policy. Maybe we need systems where you can either be anonymous and censored, or identified and uncensored. You get to pick.
- yarrel 8y ago
  Real names don't stop harassment, whether on the WELL in the 90s or YouTube in the 2010s. They do however harm the most vulnerable in society, either excluding them from platforms or making it easy for their harassers to find and target them. Anonymity is at worst neutral for harassment. Removing it doesn't do what people hope.
- moogly 8y ago
  https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/01/05/using-real-names-online-leads-to-discrimination-and-harrassment/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/01/05/using-real-names...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pkamb 8y ago
With the popularity of non-real-name Instagram pages and "finstagrams" it seems strange that Facebook has not implemented a checkbox for "seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life". But, then again, it is Facebook we're talking about.
- gaius 8y ago
  "seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life" Their T&Cs prohibit having more than one account, so they would never implement this feature no matter how much sense it makes.
  - pkamb 8y ago
    The instagram app has great multi-account support...
  - ecnahc515 8y ago
    That's for Facebook.com not instagram. Instagram actively promotes multiple accounts.
megaman8 8y ago
I dont understandy, Why doesn't instagram just come up with some negativity filter/heuristic? Once someone reports being harassed to instagram, they can activate the filter and block all messages/tagging with negative content in it, for any and all messages directed towards the target.
Sharlin 8y ago
> The platform has cast itself as the internet’s kindest place. Excuse me but what? I thought it was common knowledge that Instagram is one of the worst places on the net when it comes to bullying.
moneil971 8y ago
A better system is needed to allow for verified accounts, without requiring the kind of info that would allow hackers and bad actors to access your real email, address, phone number, etc. Dual authentication is a start but for now, it requires putting even more info out there (I didn't share a phone number on any site until I had to for authentication purposes).

160 points by dsr12 8y ago

The problem is "massive" in the way that Instagram itself is massive, and having a public account opens you up to a massive attack surface (i.e. the global, growing audience of Instagram and the Internet at-large). As in the case with Facebook and Twitter, there's only so much a social network can do without putting real controls on who can create an account and who can participate: > Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves—by muting replies from people who don’t follow you, who you don’t follow, aren’t verified, haven’t confirmed an email address, and more—Instagram has only implemented some of these controls. Instagram had a nicer overall "personality" to it initially because it was centered around the posting of attractive, innocuous photos. But in the end, it's still a platform that allows anyone to disseminate information of any kind (not just comments, but screenshots and images of text memes), so there's no reason to think that as it becomes massively mainstream, it won't have the exact same problems as Facebook and Twitter. edit: fixed grammar

village-idiot 8y ago

I think social media operators are under-valuing the risk that harassment has to their organizations. Social media companies live and die by the network effect. New social sites sometimes hit a magic threshold point after which they take off like a rocket as "everyone" is on it. Dying social sites drop below that same point, after which it's a "ghost town", and usership falls flat. There are all kinds of things that can cause that to happen, famously redesigns and changes to moderator actions has done it in the past. But in general having a continuously shitty experience as people harass you is a pretty compelling reason to not use a social site. I cannot help but wonder if enough people will leave to trigger a mass exit or not.

peterwwillis 8y ago

*Humanity Has a Massive Harassment Problem FTFY

seany 8y ago
Maybe it isn't actually that big of a problem?
- untog 8y ago
  Maybe it is?
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Internet crazies waiting for you at your home or place of employment, most definitely is a problem. Internet crazies swatting you because you got a portafort in fortnite, or some equally trivial offense like that, most definitely is a problem. And that's not even getting into the more sinister stuff that the fbi has to deal with.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Then surely the problem isn't harrassment, but assault? Also, if you put enough information online, all it takes is one crazy/creepy stalker/murderer to track you down and do anything, that's completely orthogonal to the general problem of "online harrassment".
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      >Then surely the problem isn't harrassment, but assault?... Woah, woah, woah. I said internet crazies showing up at your place of employment is a problem. That doesn't make it assault. For instance, the outrage brigade might show up to protest in front of the company where you work for a few weeks. This is their right as Americans, and I realize and acknowledge that. At the same time, I believe it is harassment. I didn't say we should do anything to stop it. I only said that it most definitely is a problem. And if it happened to you, I'd bet that right around the time your boss called you into his or her office to give you your final paycheck, you would start to think it is a problem too. I think you went about 5 bridges WAY too far with calling a lot of that harassment "assault". A lot of the harassment is not assault. That's why it's so hard to stop. The assault stuff is the stuff that the fbi would be called in on generally speaking.

dickinson99 8y ago

Close the tab, app, etc. Walk away from the computer.

wgerard 8y ago
Bit hard to do when they're calling your work, visiting your house, swatting you, etc.
- izzydata 8y ago
  Posting identifiable information on the internet should never be done. Perhaps middle schools and high schools need to teach kids about the dangers of the internet.
  - jnty 8y ago
    This is literally the definition of victim blaming.
    - jm__87 8y ago
      How else would you avoid people identifying who you are online, other than not posting any identifiable information? If you post your home address and phone number on Facebook and people start prank calling you in the middle of the night and sending pizzas to your house, is Facebook really to blame here?
      - macintux 8y ago
        It is extremely difficult to avoid leaking information somewhere, as others have pointed out. Eventually there's a trail. People often (or at least used to) share their current location on Twitter without having any idea they were doing it. Venmo payments default to public, again something that people often don't know. And often it's not you who leaks the information but someone you know. Good luck controlling the social media presence of everyone in your family and circle of friends.

liftbigweights 8y ago

Then stop using instagram. What's with nytimes, theatlantic and the rest of the media and their endless spam and whining about social media? If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone. HN has a massive nytimes, theatlantic, etc spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter useless clickbait media. If the "journalist" at theatlantic don't like instagram, go start your own version of "nice" instagram and make billions.

untog 8y ago
> Leave HN alone. You realise these things appear because HN users submit them, and other HN users upvote them?
danso 8y ago
Instagram is part of one of the world’s largest tech companies, which makes most of its money by having people freely use and live on its service. Considering its user base is in the hundreds of millions, this makes it a company worth covering by news organizations. Your comment is as inane and oblivious as me telling you to stop whining about The Atlantic, because it’s free and if you don’t like what you see you should just log off.
tantalor 8y ago
Then stop using HN. What's with liftbigweights and their endless spam and whining about interesting, on-topic submissions? If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone. liftbigweights has a massive HN spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter trolls. If the "user" at liftbigweights don't like HN, go start your own version of "nice" HN and make billions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

marcodave 8y ago

"... Instagram enables easy sign up via just an email address" Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users? I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity. Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact

danso 8y ago
IIRC, virtually every service just requires an email address, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve found that Twitter now quickly throttles any dummy accounts I make by requiring a phone number. But obviously, there’s huge downsides to requiring a phone number.
bearcobra 8y ago
Requiring confirmation with an SMS code seems like a reasonable step to tie accounts to a more permanent identifier which can then be used for moderation.
- tracker1 8y ago
  For a nominal fee, one can get a burner phone/account to sign up for any number of sites. It does very little to de-anonymize someone.
  - GavinMcG 8y ago
    But it does a lot to weed out the many harassers who aren't that motivated.
  - scott_s 8y ago
    It doesn't de-anonymize someone, but it's a much bigger hurdle than an email address, which is free and someone can get on a whim. More friction could curb troll accounts.

wgerard 8y ago

Bringing this to a top-level comment: People wildly underestimate how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely. Even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2]. Once it's out (and spoiler alert, it's out), "stepping away from the computer" is no longer an option. The article describes in detail how it transitions from online to real-life harassment: Swatting, stopping by your personal residence, calling your work, calling your friends and family, etc. Yes, it happens to people of moderate means and very minor celebrity. Yes, you can suffer physical harm or death as a result [3]. Yes, we should also try and solve the swatting problem from the police side as well. 1: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-location/ https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-l... 2: Equifax 3: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affidavit/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affi...

justicezyx 8y ago
Actually, if anyone pays any attention to Chines online space, "human flesh search" has been working for over a decade since the early dawn of the mass adoption of Internet in China. The moral of the story is that no matter how careful one protect their identity, they always leak more than they thought they are leaking.
reggieband 8y ago
Reminds me of a video [1] posted by Tom Scott from "Things you might not know" youbtube. He and a friend posted a photo of themselves watching the eclipse somewhere in the USA and it is scary how accurately their location was found by Internet sleuths. I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet. There are some freaky good stalkers out there. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ
- girst 8y ago
  Also from Tom Scott: "I know what you did five minutes ago" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVBshcN7wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVBshcN7wU

jerf 8y ago

I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes. I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free. [1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.

tracker1 8y ago
Is the solution more anonymity, or less? Are reputation systems a good idea in general? On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more. In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill. The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.
- kazinator 8y ago
  The solution is to disable communication by default. Nobody can post anything to any feed on anyone's profile, nor send any private message, unless they are in the list of approved users. To get linked, you initiate a the "add me to your group" request. This request is just a flag which asserts "X is interested in linking with Y". It cannot be repeatedly asserted, and no text or images may be attached to it. (If someone wants to harass you with these contact requests, they will have to keep creating new profiles, and fill those profiles themselves with hateful content targeting you.) The system could use Bayesian filtering on profile content to determine which kinds of accounts you don't like linking with.

tomp 8y ago

I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).

danso 8y ago
Twitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-... https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listening-problem-accdf6277b88 https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...
- criddell 8y ago
  My favorite user blocklist was the one that listed every Twitter advertiser. I think the maintainer shut it down, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
- tomp 8y ago
  Ideally companies/platforms would provide first-class support for them, and even urge the users to choose their own after they sign up! Wil Wheaton isn't a platform, he's a private user, and it's not entirely unironic that he "got" what he was promoting for others (being de-platformed)...

monksy 8y ago

For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. (It's harder to navigate and participate in compared to say reddit or fb) I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity. What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).

tracker1 8y ago
I agree, to an extent. When people invite celebrity status, there will always follow trolls. It simply doesn't matter how great you are. And many don't have the stability and coping systems to deal with it. In saying this, I'm definitely not saying I do... I take a lot of things far more personally than intended, and can only try to not let my instincts drive me when I do. It isn't easy to be on the receiving side of things... that said, I don't think outright censorship is the answer. Couldn't this kid report/block other users on the system giving him grief? Also, for those blocked, probably shouldn't indicate that they've been blocked. I've always found it funny that on Twitter, when someone blocks you, you can no longer see their public profile and tweets. It'd be far better to allow you to see it, but only the blocked see their own retweets/replies. I don't think the people making decisions always think through their decisions. The problem with something like this drawing attention and potentially reacting too quickly is the chance to make things worse is far more likely than actually approving anything.
Sharlin 8y ago
> For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. You seem to be pretty out of the loop when it comes to Instagram's primary user group. Many teens/early 20s these days don't even have a computer, a smartphone is all they use. They're definitely accustomed to phone UIs. > I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. Don't generalize from a single datapoint, especially when that datapoint is not a representative sample at all. > What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it). This is just straightforward victim blaming without even trying to understand what is actually going on.

Animats 8y ago

Harassment is mostly a problem because of anonymity. Facebook has a point with their "real names" policy. Maybe we need systems where you can either be anonymous and censored, or identified and uncensored. You get to pick.

yarrel 8y ago
Real names don't stop harassment, whether on the WELL in the 90s or YouTube in the 2010s. They do however harm the most vulnerable in society, either excluding them from platforms or making it easy for their harassers to find and target them. Anonymity is at worst neutral for harassment. Removing it doesn't do what people hope.
moogly 8y ago
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/01/05/using-real-names-online-leads-to-discrimination-and-harrassment/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/01/05/using-real-names...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pkamb 8y ago

With the popularity of non-real-name Instagram pages and "finstagrams" it seems strange that Facebook has not implemented a checkbox for "seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life". But, then again, it is Facebook we're talking about.

gaius 8y ago
"seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life" Their T&Cs prohibit having more than one account, so they would never implement this feature no matter how much sense it makes.
- pkamb 8y ago
  The instagram app has great multi-account support...
- ecnahc515 8y ago
  That's for Facebook.com not instagram. Instagram actively promotes multiple accounts.

megaman8 8y ago

I dont understandy, Why doesn't instagram just come up with some negativity filter/heuristic? Once someone reports being harassed to instagram, they can activate the filter and block all messages/tagging with negative content in it, for any and all messages directed towards the target.

Sharlin 8y ago

> The platform has cast itself as the internet’s kindest place. Excuse me but what? I thought it was common knowledge that Instagram is one of the worst places on the net when it comes to bullying.

moneil971 8y ago

A better system is needed to allow for verified accounts, without requiring the kind of info that would allow hackers and bad actors to access your real email, address, phone number, etc. Dual authentication is a start but for now, it requires putting even more info out there (I didn't share a phone number on any site until I had to for authentication purposes).