Twitter Says It's Beating the Trolls (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: After making it easier to report abusive tweets and increasing the size of its anti-troll team, Twitter believes it is getting 'bad behavior' under control. As well as bullying of acquaintances and work colleagues, Twitter has also been used to attack celebrities, the gay community, religious groups, and more, with many people feeling driven from the site. It seems that the decision to take a very hands-on approach to troll tackling is starting to pay off. The head of Twitter in Europe, Bruce Daisley, says that the tools that have been introduced have had a real impact on trolling. He goes further, saying that there is a direct correlation between the release of new safety tools and reporting mechanisms, and the drop in unacceptable behavior.

Comments

"Beating the trolls" is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've read, Twitter is infact censoring some tweets, depending on the terminology used.
Apparently several gamergate people have been for lack of a better word "shadowbanned" or words which are trending are deliberately not showing up.

Say what you will about Gamergate (it's certainly a stupid name) - there's some real dipshits involved with it, who've said some ghastly shit.
There's *ALSO* some perfectly sane people who've said some quite intelligent things, however one side of the debate has succeeded in altering history and current time, by somehow managing to label the entire group, virtually terrorists, including lying about what's been said or done, claiming they are "in the right" regardless of what the other people say, dismissing things that people say because of who they are (strawman) and so on.

It's been quite eye opening to watch actually and one thing I have noticed which I wouldn't have before, is that I have a far, FAR more skeptical eye on things in the regular and gaming media. It's opened my eyes HUGELY, in how things are reported. "X is bad, X did this, X said this" etc, when some of those things are utterly impossible to prove, outright incorrect, or labeling an entire group for one persons actions - been an educational year.

FWIW: I'd align myself as closer to GG than not, but certainly not "active" more a casual observer in it all.

As for twitter censoring and this news article, as I stated, I've heard multiple times in the past 6 months, certain things are simple not being made visible due to who they are or what's being said, even if it's not offensive - use the wrong hashtag, prepare for potential censorship.

Note: Posting anonymously, as usual with any gamergate discussion of any kind, lest "the good nice guys" harass and dox me (but that side is infallible and that's never occurred before, honest!)

Re: "Beating the trolls" is it?

[Kjella]

its still censorship, its just legal censorship. they have the right to set the rules on their site that is 100% correct. but its not fair to claim its not censorship

I'm an atheist. I don't demand equal time with the priest in church, if they want a forum by Christians for Christians that's fine and I don't consider it censorship but don't call it public debate. It's when you've driven away all the dissenting opinions by forced registration, real name policies, labeling them "trolls" and moderating them away and still pretend that what you have is a public debate that I disagree. It's a sanitized, whitewashed debate where hardly anybody would voice personal information or opinions their family, friends, employer, landlord or anybody else would take offense from.

And not because they're doing anything wrong, if you interviewed one of the daughters of Muslim immigrants on equality of the sexes, hijab, forced marriage, female genital mutilation etc. I bet roughly 99% would give different answers under promise of anonymity than under full name, published for the world and everyone they know to see. Just because the government isn't going to throw me in jail over it, doesn't make free speech advisable.

It's probably true that you get more hateful opinions with anonymity/pseduo-anonymity, but I don't think there's any reason to believe they're less true. There's a saying at least in Norway "from children and drunken men you hear the truth" and I think that is because they don't think about consequences. The emperor's new clothes and all that. The only free exchange of opinion is the one free from consequence, the question is if you want to hear it or not. And the world is trending towards no, thank you.

Re: "Beating the trolls" is it?

[serviscope_minor]

I completely disagree.

A public debate isn't a free-for-all where anyone can say anything. If you don't eject the trolls then the trolls will drive people away. You've still got the de-facto censorship which you claim prevents public debate except now new the targets of censorship are chosen by the nastiest, craziest faction.

You are falsely equating doing nothing with being open. That's unfortunately not the case: you're just letting someone else do the closing for you.

You're picture of public discourse sounds more or less equivalent to perfect freedom: it can't exist because... Well, the perfect freedom debate is long hashed over and I expect I'm unlikely to give you new insights to that.

Ok...

[MikeRT]

And here's a serious question. Why wasn't that Minnesota politician who doxxed her complaining constituents banned from Twitter? It made national headlines because she was taking a self-righteous "herp derp, take that you racists" view of perfectly sane, non-racist complaints that she was siding with Black Lives Matter as they planned to disrupt access to an airport and the Mall of America.

Then she takes her account private. You want to drive these trolls off social media? When they do stuff like that, block them from privacy. Make every dirty, rotten thing they've said public.

Slashdot Forgot the Censorship and YRO Icons

[Kunedog]

Why didn't the earlier story about internet freedom make any mention of this Twitter banfest, Slashdot? Why was there never a /. story about Vice (where the internet freedom story came from) itself hypocritically silencing the masses by wiping out its own comments section, ensuring that only themselves and approved plebians will have a voice on their site?

Why was there never a /. story about the ridiculous UN Women/Broadband propaganda report that tried to promote the idea of "cyber-violence" (an awkardly obvious pretense to a desired government crackdown) which proved so embarassing that they had to pull it from public view (and no /. story when that happened either).

It's abundantly clear that there's an activist arm of the tech news media (which Slashdot, sadly, clearly wants to be part of) that isn't anti-censorship or anti-bullying at all, as long as they get to be (or choose) the approved bullies and censors.