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Twitter Rolls Out New Anti-Abuse Tools
An anonymous reader writes: After facing criticism that it gives trolls and hatemongers a platform to intimidate people, Twitter has now rolled out a new set of tools and policies to handle abusive tweets. Previously, they only prohibited threats of violence that were "direct" and "specific," but now that's been expanded to all threats of violence or tweets promoting violence. They said, "Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior." Twitter has also added non-permanent bans, as well as this: "[W]e have begun to test a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach. This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive." Twitter's general counsel recently said, "Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up. We need to do a better job combating abuse without chilling or silencing speech."
Twitter's hypocrisy was eyeroll worthy before, but it's just outright silly now. They're trying to pander to the very group of people with a history of doxing, threats, and hate speech so vitriolic and pathological that they've had to invent new slurs to keep up with the sheer level of hate they're trying to convey.
It's going to be interesting to see what mindbending excuses Twitter comes up with to continue allowing people like Randi Harper to stay unbanned despite publicly admitting to doxing and threatening to dox others, or Zoe Quinn after also doxing people, or Geordie Tait after his epic multi thousand word racist rant, or...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Is handing out torches to angry villagers. Going to be interesting to see how they square this.
There is nothing bizarre about it. Not all voices are equally desirable. To give an example, there are a number of women working in the games space who are targeted every time they express any sort of view. Some of these threats are simply extraordinarily disgusting. It is surely no surprise that Twitter wants to target ("silence" if you will) people who threaten other users?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Twitter's hypocrisy was eyeroll worthy before, but it's just outright silly now.
I could be wrong, but I took your "SJW" comment to be a reference to those who abuse the "report for abuse" button.
This is a real phenomenon. Twitter has a history of suspending people for reported abuse, when in fact the "offending" party hadn't abused anyone or anything at all. For some people, like modding "troll" rather than "disagree", it has become synonymous for "I don't like this person, so I'm going to do something nasty".
To compound the problem further, Twitter doesn't tell the "offending" party what they did wrong. Occasionally -- not always by any means -- they will let people know what the "offending" Tweet was, but not specifically what was wrong with it or why anyone objected.
Twitter could easily do that without revealing the name or names of the complainants. But insisting that people stop "abuse" when they don't even know WHAT people complained about, is completely unreasonable in an atmosphere of "report abuse because I don't agree".
This argument holds no water when gamergaters are so desperate to get the gg autoblocker banned.
This sounds very noble, but a huge number of these threats are threats to rape people. That doesn't sound like something that someone with their back against the wall would threaten.
The best fix is to be able to conduct discourse only with people who don't threaten to rape or murder other people. I use the gg autoblocker, but I can understand why some people don't want to do that and I can also understand why Twitter would want to suspend/remove people like that from their service.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room