Twitter CEO: "We Suck" At Dealing With Trolls, Vows To Kick Them Out

AmiMoJo writes "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we've sucked at it for years," wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a leaked internal post. "We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day." Gamergate is only the latest and loudest example of harassment. Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, left the service last August because of the disturbing images and attacks she received after her father's suicide. Advocates have offered numerous suggestions for fixing the problem, including improving responsiveness to reports and better blocking tools.

Comments

Be careful how you define Troll

[Drethon]

After they get rid of all those Christian, Muslim, Athiest, Gay, whatever trolls and all you hear is crickets. Yeah I'm being extreme but I'd rather a few trolls slip through rather than a lot of good posts getting pulled.

Re:Be careful how you define Troll

[plover]

I'd rather lose those few (allegedly) "good" posts than read any more trolls. If it's too hard tell the difference between an semi-literate rant over "how angles save my sole" and a troll, the world isn't any worse off for not having the rant.

Despite the apparent similarities, Twitter is not a legally protected soap box in the public square. It's a private service, and they can censor anyone they want for any reason. Trolls can run off and join trolltalk.com if they want their own voice.

Re:Be careful how you define Troll

[Ol Olsoc]

After they get rid of all those Christian, Muslim, Athiest, Gay, whatever trolls and all you hear is crickets. Yeah I'm being extreme but I'd rather a few trolls slip through rather than a lot of good posts getting pulled.

There is a whole lot to that.

Because different people have different definitions, and because the people with the least ability to put up with trolls will not be happe unless all we hear is those crickets.

Some examples to my point

Quite a few years ago, AOL (it figures) had a spam reporting system that blacklisted addresses that sent spam. Problem was, a lot of users decided that anyone who disagreed with them was spamming them. Results? chaos, as the most intolerant ended up blocking completely legit emails and group activity.

A year or so back, in the commentary section of a Yahoo news story, a Devout Christian turned in everyone who disagreed with his posts as a TOS violation.

I am a moderator of a usenet newsgroup. I had a policy of letting posts go through unless they were really nasty. "Fuck off and Die!" would get rejected, but as long as things were on topic I was pretty lenient. Nothing wrong with spirited discussion in my book.

But I haven't been moderating much lately, as a less tolerant group has taken over. It would appear that spirited discussion is not allowed, and many one time posters just stopped. Now it's a collection of links to reddit and some blogs.

And now even the linkfarms are getting heavy scrutiny and many rejections.

And there is the rub. AFAIAC, the group has been destroyed. Others may find that system just wonderful. Like a nicely manicured lawn with snipers keeping the kids off of it.

It all boils down to the inescapable fact that whatever you try to do, it will not appease the most sensitive and intolerant, who will continue to be outraged by the "trolls". Which to them means any disagreement. Or profanity. Or even humor. Defined them of course.

So good luck with that, trollstoppers. Success means no postings.

Please no more censorship.

[Anonymous Coward]

The web doesn't need more heavily censored platforms. One persons troll is another persons dissident.

Re:Please no more censorship.

[OakDragon]

The web doesn't need more heavily censored platforms. One persons troll is another persons dissident.

I agree in principle, but what happened to Zelda Williams was not "dissent."

Bots

[retech]

You suck worse at dealing with bots. And worse still about dealing with follow-bait advert accounts managed by media agencies.

If you removed all of these two types of accounts, I have no doubt twitter's "user base" would drop by 80%. It's functionally useless IMHO.

Re:Bots

[Zocalo]

Might as well mention Twitter's URL shortening service, "t.co", too since that's another area of the business riddled with abuse that they just don't seem to care about. Spammers and malware pushers have been using Twitter's "t.co" links for ages to link to sites, malware and so on, yet Twitter simply doesn't care. Send an abuse report to most other link shortening services and the malicious link is usually dead within a couple of days, and more often within a few hours, yet "t.co" links seem to be inspired by De Beers and last forever so presumably the abuse reports are simply /dev/null'd. On the plus side, you can pretty much guarantee any email with a "t.co" link is spam and score it accordingly (or just reject them outright since the FP rate is so low), but it would be nice if they did something about that too.

Re:slashdot?

[plover]

Slashdot moderation isn't web scale ;)

It's a damn sight better than the nothing that exists today.

Re:slashdot?

[Megane]

Seriously, the slashdot moderation system works well for what it moderates: a bunch of threads which each get a couple of hundred replies that you see mostly at the same time.

Those who actually read articles accumulate points that let them moderate up to 5 or 15 posts in a 3-day period every month or so, and (something I would implement if I set up a blog, because of all the "thanks for your post!" spammers) all threads are closed after two weeks. It's not trivial to get mod points on multiple accounts, and you also don't know exactly when you'll get points.

Meta-moderation is a good idea too, but it's been fucked since they changed it from Agree/Disagree to +/- about five or so years ago without ever updating the FAQ to say whether +/- means Agree/Disagree or Good post/Bad post. Actually it was fucked much, much earlier than that when there was a bug that prevented the "Have you meta-moderated today?" from ever showing up on certain accounts (like mine) and the only way to meta-moderate was to go to metamod.pl manually.

Twitter is basically just a bunch of random posts (like "Hey, I just pooped!") that are loosely linked with # and @ characters in free-form text. It's like in the old BBS days when you would post a message to "All", with nothing like a "thread" with a root post. You just poop out your "hashtag BowelMovement" into the Twitter-space, where you might get as few as zero readers. Try to crowd-moderate that. Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter ended up as popular as it is for having basically no structure other than "fits in an SMS message" and "# and @ mean something". Really, the only significant thing added beyond that original idea is attaching an image.

The "fix" for Twitter

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I'm totally serious on this. Do what I do. I've never been on Twitter. I never will be on Twitter. End of story.

The problem with Twitter is that people think it's valuable. It's not valuable at all. The press is forced to pretend its valuable because their jobs require them to have Twitter accounts. So this had led to the situation where people in the press quote random users on controversial subjects as if their opinions are really important just because they were said on Twitter.

All Twitter is is a way to behave like an ass and say stupid things, sometimes with consequences, sometimes with no consequences. The greatest trick Twitter pulled is convincing people that it's actually important and worth caring about and paying attention to. I still firmly believe that in a not too distant future it will be about as meaningful as My Space is today and future generations will be absolutely baffled that anybody actually thought Twitter was important or useful in the past.

From TFA

[argStyopa]

Dear Twitter CEO:
If you don't understand the difference between trolling and cyberbullying, you already fail.

Trolling: "Global warming is bullshit"
Cyberbullying: "I'm going to chain you to the radiator and grape you in the mouth for decades and decades.*

*I recognize that I'm out of the norm by having a pretty high standard here limited to libel or actual threats, which ARE illegal already; I have very mixed feelings about the whole American societal thing about bullying in general today (of which "cyber" bullying is just an element). But that's tangential to my point here.

Re:Troll = Anyone who disagrees with our groupthin

[ckatko]

You realize the SJW side of Gamergate has an equal, if not worse, record of doxxing people, right?

So where's their equal, if not worse, condemnation?