Slashdot Mirror
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.
I suppose they should copy the slashdot moderation system. =)
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.
The web doesn't need more heavily censored platforms. One persons troll is another persons dissident.
I thought trolls WERE Twitter's core users.
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.
They should allow downvotes. :)
6000 downvotes might not make you happy, but it's better than personal threats.
That would allow people to vent their emotions. Or show that they are the only person who has a certain opinion.
It's not a silver bullet, but would make me personally very happy
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Crybaby celebs leaving in a huffy when (social) media wasn't able to protect them from the truth is the best Twitter news I've heard in years. I almost feel sorry Twitter got stuck in the middle of it, but if people stopped sleeping around for jobs, pretending the internet can "forget" what happened, and manipulating the media then there would certainly be fewer scandals getting blown wide open.
Trolls may make some shit posts, but shit people are what attract them.
It's very common for groups to mass-flag legitimate posts in an effort to censor conversation. It's also common for internet boards to selectively enforce flagging, such as unflagging nontrolls supporting one side of an argument days before nontrolls supporting the other side.
Metamoderation really helps. In before jokes: For all its sins Slashdot comments tend to be of higher quality than most other places on the internet.
I think an organization with a solid pro-free-speech, pro-neutrality platform could also maintain unbiased comment management but I don't think you can find that in a publicly traded organization. Non-rehtorical question: beyond moderation and metamoderation does anyone know an effective way to raise comment quality?
As for trolls in particular I don't see any reason to deal with them differently from other unhelpful, low-effort posts.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Every time I think of Gamergate, I'm reminded of that scene in PCU where the protestors break out the blank placards and start writing the latest liberal cause-of-the-moment slogans on them. Some people are just always looking for an oppressor to blame for all their problems, and some cause to give their pathetic lives some meaning. And being the drama queens they are, they feed on any criticism as further evidence that they're being oppressed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Absolutely not!
They should be 140 characters or fewer.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Does this mean Twitter's finally going to ban the SJWs? I mean, they've done a ton of damage to legitimate businesses by getting accounts banned for disagreeing with them in the name of "harassment". Look at what's happened to Rogue Star Games.
Oh, wait, I forgot, getting "little people" fired from their jobs by harassing their employers is A-OK as long as SJWs do it. Getting small companies banned from social media is A-OK as long as it's the companies the SJWs don't like. It's the people complaining about the people causing real economic damage on Twitter that are the "trolls". My bad!
When you're posting pictures of you in front of someone you don't like's work place because they said something you don't like counts as something. Maybe not trolling. But it's abusive and shitty and stalking like that happens fairly regularly on the internet.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
tbh i enjoyed the tropes vs women video series. I found them to be +1 interesting and +1 insightful. I didn't agree with everything, but I found them reasoned and well documented. I suspect that the people with the most hate never actually watched the videos.
So our rights end where your feelings begin? Yet you still want a platform to express your opinions, right? It's ok for you but not for others who disagree? It's ok for you to use something popular like twitter to express yours, but not ok for those who disagree to do the same?
What if 8chan wasn't run by a neo nazi? Would you be ok with it then? If not, then it doesn't matter what he is.
I find it ironic that you post anonymously here while bitching about anonymous speech.
Watched quite a few because I find them amusing. The documentation is very cherry-picked. As for reasoned, that only works if you accept their rather agenda driven premises.
What he means is: "We suck at censoring opinions that disagree with our particular upper middle class intellectual left coast views."
The best way I have heard of dealing with trolls iis making them invisible to everyone but the troll. The troll continues to see his comments but no one else does.
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.
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.
-Styopa
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?
I'm confused, I thought the ability to troll anybody and everybody was exactly the point of twitter.
You're a perfect example of a SJW. You wrap everything up in emotion and oppression to make yourself look like a martyr. ("I've got karma to burn.") And then when people stop taking you seriously because of your outbursts, you complain people are just indoctrinated slaves of the system. ("I'll take a sweepstake on whether I get troll or flamebait.")
It took all of 30 seconds to find that Slade Villena of RogueStar Games leaked sensitive financial records from Polytron and IFG as retaliation for some form of SJW infighting.
So they point he's getting at, while not perfectly written, is not some intentional deception. Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance. The point he's getting at is that the SJW-side of Gamergate is using fascist tactics against their enemies. And everyone is afraid to stop them for fear of being their next victim. It's domestic terrorism, and it's gotten so vehement that they're starting to do what all terrorists do... fight each other over who is a bigger martyr. And now they're beginning to use their own despicable tactics of doxxing, shame, getting people fired from their jobs, and emotional outbursts against each other.
The SJW movement will be remembered as a terrorist wing that delayed the feminism movement. And everyone is keeping their heads in the sand lest they be the next victim of a career-killing bomb.
They should be 140 characters or fewer.
Er. No, not quite.
Reference: http://www.oxforddictionaries....
Less is also used with numbers when they are on their own and with expressions of measurement or time,
The cover-up didn't work.
The week-long gaming press news blackout and user comment/forum censorship didn't work.
The coordinated, ongoing smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Over" articles hasn't worked.
The doxxing and harassment of pro-GG folks hasn't worked.
The endless train of embarrassingly desperate counter-hashtags hasn't worked.
The Wikipedia and Nightline hit pieces only damage those outlets' credibility for short-term effect.
PC Gamer is the latest games journalism site to update its ethics policy in the wake of Gamergate, joining IGN, the Escapist, and of course Kotaku/Gawker (though in Gawker's case, they put up more of a fight and the Gamergate pressure to be ethical had to be routed through the FTC). And there are probably more I'm forgetting.
Gamergate also got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him:
https://twitter.com/iamDavidWi...
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
http://www.zenofdesign.com/in-...
Ask yourself how much of this you've seen reported in the corrupt media (which at this point, sadly, clearly includes Slashdot). Of course none of it ever had a chance of appearing in the Wikipedia article. Nothing enrages anti-Gamergaters more than someone covering both sides of the story, and that should tell you something.
Their side thrives only in an environment of propaganda and censorship, and evaporates when faced with integrity and transparency. They prove the need for Gamergate every time they write an article based on the assumption that terrorism and child porn^W^W^W^W misogyny and harassment have become the root passwords to the Constitution^W^W journalistic ethics.
One of the most important reasons Gamergate hasn't died is that it exposed (as part of coordinated effort to stomp it out) forces with an apparent willingness and (more shockingly) ability to successfully censor vast swarths of the internet, including sites like slashdot, reddit, and 4chan that were taken for granted as free-speech strongholds.
Of course people are going to care now that they threaten Twitter, which has been second only to Youtube as a major thorn in the censors' sides.
Huh? Grow a thicker skin? Although I agree in general that people have no right not to be offended, If someone and their friends send repeated threats to me saying that they were going to kill me (like Sarkeesian got), it appears to go past the "grow a thicker skin" stage. Just sayin'. If you can't say you disagree with someone without making threats, you're probably too fucking stupid or emotionally out of control to be online anyway.
That is all.
The problem is that having received a death threat, Sarkeesian and her allies feel they should be able to silence anyone who criticizes them on the grounds that those people contribute the environment in which death threats occur.
The memo doesn't mention Gamergate so I had to check who did.
Turns out the source of this summary is The Verge and it is one of the corrupt medias Gamergate is fighting. TheVerge regularly post anti-gamergate articles. So it's only fair they carried on by linking the leaked memo to GamerGate. It is in the interest of the corrupt media to silence their critics. How else will they sell their bullshit lies if there are loud critics on Twitter and Youtube?
P.s. You do not have to be in Gamergate to hate TheVerge, they are the people who brought you and fuelled #ShirtStorm.
Would this mean that they would be willing to oppose harassment by certain groups/individuals that accuse others of harassment (such as Chelsea van Valkenberg and Randi Harper, which only have harassed others into silence)?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.