6 ms·

Twitter boss 'sorry' to abused women

26 points by equilibrium 13y ago

regal 13y ago
She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to come up with this. "Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button. "The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been. "Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them." ----------------- Two thoughts: One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic. Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.
- brador 13y ago
  It looks to me like they want customer service on a free service.
  - esalman 13y ago
    A 'free' service that treats its users like products and makes money off them?
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    If people didn't want services on free services, then the people who were using them to make money would be up the creek. Adding 'customer' in front of that concept doesn't change the underlying relationship.
    - brador 13y ago
      Human customer service doesn't scale well. The number of false flags Twitter will get on this report button is non trivial. Most people are assholes when they get power, and that report button is power. It will be used by some to remove people they don't like from Twitter. We've seen the same on other services (youtube), and we'll see it here.
      - scholia 13y ago
        We have computers that block spam, remove content from Google's index, drive cars and win at Jeopardy. They could certainly remove a lot of abuse, and that would be worth doing. I'm not convinced it would result in wrongly removing a lot of people, since there is some form of karma in the number of followers and the number of lists someone is on. Of course, it would be nice to have some recourse to an independent appeal if something goes wrong. However, Google manages without one (1), and its decisions can have devastating personal and financial consequences. That's not the case with Twitter, where there is no real barrier to creating accounts. Including spam accounts. (1) Unless you happen to be buddies with someone at Google.
      - 6d0debc071 13y ago
        > Human customer service doesn't scale well. Mmm, well, there you're changing your argument on me ^_^; Okay, let's talk about that instead. Problems: False positives, (from whose perspective?) low staff to customer ratio. Potential solutions: Recruit volunteer staff Pros: More staff. Cons: Some of them are going to be evil. Let users report people they don't want to hear from (as you point out, this is how it will work) Pros: Reduces staff tasks Cons: Again, might be used for evil So, essentially what we seem to be looking at with the above problems is a trust issue. If you give people binary access to total power, even on a probabilistic basis as per the report function, then it's going to be abuse. Potential solutions: Give people more limited forms of power than banning and not banning. Pros: - varies Cons: Less deterrents? How might we do that? Potential solutions: Let people ban others from their accounts. Pros: No longer have to worry about people who just don't like someone banning them. Cons: Loses a lot of the social deterrent effect, people who joke about rape probably don't care about continuing to talk to the person they're attacking anyway. Cons: Doesn't let you network with people who are likely to share your values, so you'll get exposed to attacks anyway. (This seems to be the current state of affairs - I don't really use twitter so I don't know, but suggestions on pages seem to imply it.) If we solve the second problem there, the first one becomes less of an issue. At this point it starts to look like a networking and evidence problem. If we have ban groups - that you can join or unjoin as you please, to make abuse less likely, and have each individual user's decisions absolutely override any group level decision for their account. Okay, what are the potential problems with that? How would you vote? If someone's banned from one person's account gets banned from all of them, then as the group increases the power of any individual within that group will increase. Require more than one person to make a decision to get rid of someone? How do we stop groups of thugs just voting to shut someone up? Choose a representative sample? Say by forwarding the reported post to three people within the group and having them all sign off on it. Downside is you duplicate work - upside is you reduce the potential for them all to be evil - and if the group itself is evil then it's not a group that people would want to be part of anyway. How do you keep trolls out? If the group consistently votes against your reports, then your reports stop being received? ========================== I don't know, admittedly this isn't my area and this is like ten minutes thought. But it doesn't seem to me like an absolutely unsolvable problem as much as it seems a bit tricky.
- gabemart 13y ago
  >a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored A la "Flag for spam" on youtube comments. I would hesitantly estimate that perhaps 1% of comments which appear with a "This has been flagged as spam" warning are actually spam.
- Dewie 13y ago
  One possible solution might be to only let people that have registered with their real name report abuse easily, and they can report anyone (real name or not). These are the people who people can easily track down, so death threats are much more frightening to receive for these people. They will probably abuse the report function less since they feel like they are interacting in an open public space with their real identity, and I guess they might be easier to ban from the service if they abuse it. The problem would be to find out who is actually registering with real names, but I think Facebook have done this for a while now. It shouldn't be a problem for people that are a bit famous, and with the lopsided amount of people on Twitter that are followed compared to the whole userbase, I guess it might mostly be decently famous people that would have the want or need to register with their real names.
osfp 13y ago
This is the death of twitter, it will become just another propaganda machine. People who like propaganda machine will continue to use twitter, people who don't like propaganda machine will use other microblogging tools instead of twitter.
- BgSpnnrs 13y ago
  Is there a decently populated microblogging tool that people are migrating to?
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Yeah. In the UK we call it a "pub".
- parfe 13y ago
  Wouldn't want to impinge on your free speeches. Dissident dialogue might be unfairly silenced, such as this comment: https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Interesting that lower down the comment is referred to as a joke. However, things said that are clearly jokes, can result in arrest and prosecution, then jail. Weird.
    - parfe 13y ago
      That's a different user referring to a different comment made over voice chat on xbox.
  - makomk 13y ago
    > https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 That's awful and obviously shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, given how serious rape threats are, you would presumably agree that anyone who used those rape threats to pressure for censorship of political viewpoints they disagreed with was trivialising rape and should be called out for doing so?
DanBC 13y ago
I don;t know if there's a cultural difference, but people in the UK are generally okay with preventing people making threats to rape, kill, or bomb women. All of those are currently illegal. I'm not sure what Twitter should do - include an abuse button that sends reports to a Twitter team who then report people to the relevant police? Or who then collect evidence in case the police contact Twitter (with suitable legal documentation)? People do go to jail in the UK for making stupid comments on the Internet. Here's an English 'troll' who made threats against US schools: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326) Being able to report illegal content seems like a reasonable request. Being able to report content that breaks the ToS / AUP seems like a reasonable request. Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular (but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to protecting people from harm. I guess they might want to have some kind of transparency report to show how much stuff gets taken down, how often, and what kind of thing it is.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Free speech in the UK is under massive threat. But no one really cares. Much like the US reaction to the NSA thing. People think it wont have and effect on them, so they just ignore it. People who do care about free speech, and privacy, are subtly marginalized as radicals, which is presented as being a step or two away from being a terrorist or pervert.
  - scholia 13y ago
    Free speech does not include the right to threaten rape or violence, or to harass women. That is the case both online an offline. Try saying something like this in a loud voice in a pub and see how you get on: https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 Of course, free speech does allow a nutjob creationist to pervert science education in Texas, but that's another matter.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      The problem here is that any system that is used to fight threats of rape or violence will inevitably be used to silence political dissent, criticisms of corporations, etc. The existence of trolls is the price of free speech on the Internet.
stfu 13y ago
I absolutely dislike this development. It seems beyond my understanding why Twitter is becoming the judge over which value systems around the world are the right ones to enforce and which ones are the wrong ones. If they want to play that whole culture sensitivity game, they also need to censor all negative statements against religious figures - because there is certainly some nation, somewhere in the world, which has laws against that. It seems to me absolutely unacceptable why Twitter is bowing to free-speech censorship of one country (U.K.) and not of another (let's say all the Arabic Nations). Either you subscribe to the rigorous interpretation of free speech in the U.S. or you have to respect each Nation's individual understanding of free speech. Otherwise this is pure cultural imperialism.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  What's wrong with cultural imperialism? Some cultures just suck, and cultural relativism is nonsense. "This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." Charles Napier, British Commander of India
  - marvin 13y ago
    Cultural imperialism is wrong when you can't be absolutely, unequivocally certain that your own culture is in the right. Which means that most of the time, cultural imperialism is bad. I don't know how much you've been travelling, but every place you'll visit you will see that there are big and small differences. Most of these will be weird to you, and some will be offensive. This is true even for very similar cultures, like for instance those of Australia and the United States. It becomes pretty obvious that it's usually impossible to be right in the scientific sense, when it comes to customs and cultural norms. I think we can safely say that witch-burning, widow-burning, genital mutilation (might there be an interesting observation about a popular US custom here?) and torture are all bad enough to warrant a bit of pressure. But outside of human rights violations, or maybe things that most cultures would agree is bad, these questions become fuzzy enough that you'll be more likely to look like a jackass than do any good. Try to imagine how cultural imperialism would look to you if, for instance, India was the global superpower and not the United States. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html has some good observations about cognitive bias regarding social customs.

26 points by equilibrium 13y ago

regal 13y ago

She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to come up with this. "Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button. "The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been. "Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them." ----------------- Two thoughts: One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic. Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.

brador 13y ago
It looks to me like they want customer service on a free service.
- esalman 13y ago
  A 'free' service that treats its users like products and makes money off them?
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  If people didn't want services on free services, then the people who were using them to make money would be up the creek. Adding 'customer' in front of that concept doesn't change the underlying relationship.
  - brador 13y ago
    Human customer service doesn't scale well. The number of false flags Twitter will get on this report button is non trivial. Most people are assholes when they get power, and that report button is power. It will be used by some to remove people they don't like from Twitter. We've seen the same on other services (youtube), and we'll see it here.
    - scholia 13y ago
      We have computers that block spam, remove content from Google's index, drive cars and win at Jeopardy. They could certainly remove a lot of abuse, and that would be worth doing. I'm not convinced it would result in wrongly removing a lot of people, since there is some form of karma in the number of followers and the number of lists someone is on. Of course, it would be nice to have some recourse to an independent appeal if something goes wrong. However, Google manages without one (1), and its decisions can have devastating personal and financial consequences. That's not the case with Twitter, where there is no real barrier to creating accounts. Including spam accounts. (1) Unless you happen to be buddies with someone at Google.
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      > Human customer service doesn't scale well. Mmm, well, there you're changing your argument on me ^_^; Okay, let's talk about that instead. Problems: False positives, (from whose perspective?) low staff to customer ratio. Potential solutions: Recruit volunteer staff Pros: More staff. Cons: Some of them are going to be evil. Let users report people they don't want to hear from (as you point out, this is how it will work) Pros: Reduces staff tasks Cons: Again, might be used for evil So, essentially what we seem to be looking at with the above problems is a trust issue. If you give people binary access to total power, even on a probabilistic basis as per the report function, then it's going to be abuse. Potential solutions: Give people more limited forms of power than banning and not banning. Pros: - varies Cons: Less deterrents? How might we do that? Potential solutions: Let people ban others from their accounts. Pros: No longer have to worry about people who just don't like someone banning them. Cons: Loses a lot of the social deterrent effect, people who joke about rape probably don't care about continuing to talk to the person they're attacking anyway. Cons: Doesn't let you network with people who are likely to share your values, so you'll get exposed to attacks anyway. (This seems to be the current state of affairs - I don't really use twitter so I don't know, but suggestions on pages seem to imply it.) If we solve the second problem there, the first one becomes less of an issue. At this point it starts to look like a networking and evidence problem. If we have ban groups - that you can join or unjoin as you please, to make abuse less likely, and have each individual user's decisions absolutely override any group level decision for their account. Okay, what are the potential problems with that? How would you vote? If someone's banned from one person's account gets banned from all of them, then as the group increases the power of any individual within that group will increase. Require more than one person to make a decision to get rid of someone? How do we stop groups of thugs just voting to shut someone up? Choose a representative sample? Say by forwarding the reported post to three people within the group and having them all sign off on it. Downside is you duplicate work - upside is you reduce the potential for them all to be evil - and if the group itself is evil then it's not a group that people would want to be part of anyway. How do you keep trolls out? If the group consistently votes against your reports, then your reports stop being received? ========================== I don't know, admittedly this isn't my area and this is like ten minutes thought. But it doesn't seem to me like an absolutely unsolvable problem as much as it seems a bit tricky.
gabemart 13y ago
>a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored A la "Flag for spam" on youtube comments. I would hesitantly estimate that perhaps 1% of comments which appear with a "This has been flagged as spam" warning are actually spam.
Dewie 13y ago
One possible solution might be to only let people that have registered with their real name report abuse easily, and they can report anyone (real name or not). These are the people who people can easily track down, so death threats are much more frightening to receive for these people. They will probably abuse the report function less since they feel like they are interacting in an open public space with their real identity, and I guess they might be easier to ban from the service if they abuse it. The problem would be to find out who is actually registering with real names, but I think Facebook have done this for a while now. It shouldn't be a problem for people that are a bit famous, and with the lopsided amount of people on Twitter that are followed compared to the whole userbase, I guess it might mostly be decently famous people that would have the want or need to register with their real names.

osfp 13y ago

This is the death of twitter, it will become just another propaganda machine. People who like propaganda machine will continue to use twitter, people who don't like propaganda machine will use other microblogging tools instead of twitter.

BgSpnnrs 13y ago
Is there a decently populated microblogging tool that people are migrating to?
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Yeah. In the UK we call it a "pub".
parfe 13y ago
Wouldn't want to impinge on your free speeches. Dissident dialogue might be unfairly silenced, such as this comment: https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Interesting that lower down the comment is referred to as a joke. However, things said that are clearly jokes, can result in arrest and prosecution, then jail. Weird.
  - parfe 13y ago
    That's a different user referring to a different comment made over voice chat on xbox.
- makomk 13y ago
  > https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 That's awful and obviously shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, given how serious rape threats are, you would presumably agree that anyone who used those rape threats to pressure for censorship of political viewpoints they disagreed with was trivialising rape and should be called out for doing so?

DanBC 13y ago

I don;t know if there's a cultural difference, but people in the UK are generally okay with preventing people making threats to rape, kill, or bomb women. All of those are currently illegal. I'm not sure what Twitter should do - include an abuse button that sends reports to a Twitter team who then report people to the relevant police? Or who then collect evidence in case the police contact Twitter (with suitable legal documentation)? People do go to jail in the UK for making stupid comments on the Internet. Here's an English 'troll' who made threats against US schools: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22813326) Being able to report illegal content seems like a reasonable request. Being able to report content that breaks the ToS / AUP seems like a reasonable request. Protecting the free speech rights of people who are saying unpopular (but not illegal nor ToS violating) things shouldn't be a barrier to protecting people from harm. I guess they might want to have some kind of transparency report to show how much stuff gets taken down, how often, and what kind of thing it is.

alan_cx 13y ago
Free speech in the UK is under massive threat. But no one really cares. Much like the US reaction to the NSA thing. People think it wont have and effect on them, so they just ignore it. People who do care about free speech, and privacy, are subtly marginalized as radicals, which is presented as being a step or two away from being a terrorist or pervert.
- scholia 13y ago
  Free speech does not include the right to threaten rape or violence, or to harass women. That is the case both online an offline. Try saying something like this in a loud voice in a pub and see how you get on: https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/363160225873805312 Of course, free speech does allow a nutjob creationist to pervert science education in Texas, but that's another matter.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    The problem here is that any system that is used to fight threats of rape or violence will inevitably be used to silence political dissent, criticisms of corporations, etc. The existence of trolls is the price of free speech on the Internet.

stfu 13y ago

I absolutely dislike this development. It seems beyond my understanding why Twitter is becoming the judge over which value systems around the world are the right ones to enforce and which ones are the wrong ones. If they want to play that whole culture sensitivity game, they also need to censor all negative statements against religious figures - because there is certainly some nation, somewhere in the world, which has laws against that. It seems to me absolutely unacceptable why Twitter is bowing to free-speech censorship of one country (U.K.) and not of another (let's say all the Arabic Nations). Either you subscribe to the rigorous interpretation of free speech in the U.S. or you have to respect each Nation's individual understanding of free speech. Otherwise this is pure cultural imperialism.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
What's wrong with cultural imperialism? Some cultures just suck, and cultural relativism is nonsense. "This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." Charles Napier, British Commander of India
- marvin 13y ago
  Cultural imperialism is wrong when you can't be absolutely, unequivocally certain that your own culture is in the right. Which means that most of the time, cultural imperialism is bad. I don't know how much you've been travelling, but every place you'll visit you will see that there are big and small differences. Most of these will be weird to you, and some will be offensive. This is true even for very similar cultures, like for instance those of Australia and the United States. It becomes pretty obvious that it's usually impossible to be right in the scientific sense, when it comes to customs and cultural norms. I think we can safely say that witch-burning, widow-burning, genital mutilation (might there be an interesting observation about a popular US custom here?) and torture are all bad enough to warrant a bit of pressure. But outside of human rights violations, or maybe things that most cultures would agree is bad, these questions become fuzzy enough that you'll be more likely to look like a jackass than do any good. Try to imagine how cultural imperialism would look to you if, for instance, India was the global superpower and not the United States. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html has some good observations about cognitive bias regarding social customs.