Stopping Trolls Is 'Now Life and Death For Twitter', Argues Backchannel (backchannel.com)

"This is the year that Twitter's future will be determined," argues Backchannel's editorial director, noting that Twitter's revenue growth is slowing, and "None of the features that cofounder Jack Dorsey has introduced since he returned to the company as CEO last year have succeeded in attracting new users." But Backchannel suggests it's because the trolls "are winning," discouraging new sign-ups and driving existing customers to leave. "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we've sucked at it for years," Twitter's CEO wrote in an internal memo in 2015. Backchannel argues bluntly that Twitter "has a hate problem." New submitter mirandakatz writes: It's been exactly three years since Twitter first promised to solve its harassment problem. In those three years, the company has made countless such promises, introducing dozens of new "fixes" and even going so far as to ban notorious troll Milo Yiannopoulos last month. But still, abuse on Twitter continues, and stopping it is now critical to the platform's future success...
"Twitter did an excellent job of inventing a digital platform for realtime idea exchange, but it has yet to create the feature that allows the community itself to ferret out the abusers..." writes Backchannel. "And if it cannot figure out how to eradicate the harassers, Twitter's other challenges will remain intractable."

Comments

Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another "SJWs are the good guys, conservatives are the bad guys" story.

Re:Oh no

[Fragnet]

He's a professional provocateur who's "act" is designed to smoke out arseholes like you. Seems to be working.

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for using the "SJW" moniker. People know and understand what SJWs are and they know and understand why they don't want every discussion to devolve into a social justice war around which topics should get censored.

(This message was posted to preempt the latest SJW tactic of "concern trolling" about the use of the term "SJW". They don't want themselves described that way because it highlights their bad behavior. You are supposed to be on the defensive, not them.)

Re: Oh no

[Opportunist]

That has nothing to do with homophobia, that's the same rubbish as "you must hate Ghostbusters or you're misiogynist". Shit is shit.

Yiannopoulos is mostly someone who has noticed quickly how it works today. Be loud, be obnoxious and most of all be controversial. And what could possibly be more controversial than a flaming homosexual who is also a conservative? All you really have to do today to become famous is to create a shitstorm and get people worked up about yourself. Content or an actual message are so overrated. For reference, see Sarkeesian.

All you have to do is get people worked up about what you say.

Re: Oh no

[Opportunist]

And by banning him all they accomplished is giving him a platform. You can't throw a dead cat over your shoulder without hitting a video on how he was treated unfairly by Twitter. I actually remember a video about him declaring that was about the best thing that could happen to him.

Say what you want, he's good at this game. He knows how to play people.

Re:Oh no

[hairyfeet]

Informative, really mods? I can go to ANY right wing site RIGHT now and say "GOP is the rich old white people party" and I will NOT be banned...compare this to how many left wing sites will ban your ass immediately if you talk about how Hillary is a crook that deserves PMITA prison.

I should know because I have said this very thing on many right wing websites...never banned, never silenced. Been called all kinds of names, told I'm a communist, never banned. Been banned from HuffyPo, Daily Kos, Young Turks, pretty much the only "right" you have WRT free speech with the progressives is the right to be a dittohead, anything else won't be tolerated.

But hey if you can show me a link to a conservative asking for "safe spaces", issuing "trigger warnings" for differing opposing views, setting off fire alarms to keep someone from speaking, or demanding a college girl be sent to "diversity training" for daring to say something liberal, like the girl who DARED to say "all lives matter"? I'll be happy to read it, otherwise I'm sorry......trigger warning..., but you are full of shit,

Re: Oh no

[lgw]

Bah, I rather suspect you hate him because he's an outspoken conservative. Everything else is confirmation bias.

The schools have trained a generation now that "conservative == evil", and let confirmation bias do the rest. People are sure that the National Socialist party must have been right-wing, not from any study of history (where it gets into semantics, but there were lots of progressive laws early on), but because "duh, evil == conservative, any moron can therefore see the Nazis were conservative".

People actually believe that "liberals are usually right, conservatives usually wrong", in the face of the otherwise clear notion that almost all new ideas are wrong. You might make faster progress by being more accepting of new ideas, but you're necessarily going to be wrong more. But who cares about that logic stuff (logic is a tool of the patriarchy), obviously conservatives must be wrong about almost everything because "conservative == evil", and, duh, evil is wrong.

It's really remarkable what 16 years of political propaganda targeted at children and young adults can achieve. [As an aside, how many of you believe that teachers are underpaid because you learned that from a teacher growing up, and never really re-examined the idea as an adult? Maybe it's true, maybe not, but did you carry that belief into adulthood without ever realizing the conflict of interest?]

Re: Oh no

[Pseudonym]

Say what you want, he's good at this game. He knows how to play people.

He is damn good at it, but I wonder how long he can keep it up before the schtick gets old.

Still, every time he uses the term "professional victim" to refer to someone else, I chuckle to myself. They're all amateurs compared to him.

Re: Oh no

[Pseudonym]

Bah, I rather suspect you hate him because he's an outspoken conservative.

I am not the person you responded to, but I hate him because he is emblematic of what conservatism has become, to many people. Before you ask: No, it's not just conservatism. Jill Stein has been pissing me off all month in a completely different way.

I remember when every Slashdot commenter knew that "liberal" and "libertarian" were both kinds of "progressive". We were all united in the cause of human progress, and we all agreed on what the underlying problems were, even if we had ideas about how to fix them.

Post-Cold War, post-9/11, the polarised political machine has convinced us all that the enemy is the people living right next to us. Whether it's the new misogynist on the right or the anti-science hippie on the left, an intense hatred of progress has gripped large parts of the English-speaking world, and Milo represents this self-loathing in its most insanely stupid form. He's far from alone in this, but he is the one we're discussing in this thread.

Re: Oh no

[ljw1004]

I'll bite. I believe teachers in the public sector are underpaid. I've never once had a teacher of mine mention anything about pay. I don't think my teacher friends mention it either. The fact that they routinely buy pens, books, supplies out of their own budget indeed suggests they're not underpaid.

But I see how so many people teaching are there because they passionately believe in it, and they'd get higher salaries elsewhere for their skillsets, and the reaching sector doesn't attract regular people who chose jobs that pay competitively. None of it is commensurate with how I think learning and teaching should be valued in our society. I'm glad I'll (just barely) be able to afford to send my three kids to a school that does pay enough salary.

Twitter isn't interest in stopping trolls unless

[SensitiveMale]

those "trolls" disagree with Jack.

If a troll or harasser happens to have the same political views as Jack, he doesn't care.

Can't say I agree

[Derekloffin]

While trolls suck, they always had them. What they haven't had is inconsistent and overreaching policies for fighting these 'trolls'. We've seen in again and again, certain groups get free passes to say whatever they want, other groups say stuff even slightly, through a distorted lens, might look kinda trollish, banned. Get your current policies straight and consistent!

Re:Can't say I agree

[MightyMartian]

There's never been a good way to deal with actively disruptive individuals (whether you call them trolls, flamebaiters, or whatever). I remember back in the old Usenet days a few of the more "serious" newsgroups either becoming moderated or creating moderated subgroups simply to try to deal with spammers and trolls. Not a job I would have wanted.

The problem is bigger now because the Internet is bigger now, and it's every bit as hard to find a good solution to.

My attitude is that Twitter can do what it likes. It doesn't owe the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos a platform. Of course it risks going the way that so many moderated newsgroup did a quarter century ago, abandoned by users who couldn't stand the restrictive policies and uneven enforcement.

Re:Can't say I agree

[MightyMartian]

There's a reason Milo has so many fans around here. A lot of people want a version of free speech where no one can ever judge them for being fucking assholes, where there are no consequences for any kind of speech. These are the kinds of people who think a CEO of a company, that is its chief manager, can openly say homophobic things, even when many of the people working for him may be LGBTQ, because, "RIGHTS!"

All that freedom of speech guarantees is the State can't come and lock you up for saying unpopular, including bigoted things. It doesn't guarantee that your neighbors won't despise you, that your boss won't sack you, that your kids won't think your awful, and that you'll feel the narrow eyes of your fellow human beings on the back of your neck when you're buying some Corn Flakes at the store. The Founding Fathers knew very well that the best way to control nasty-mouthed people was via society's powerful levers of shame and shunning, and the State itself should never pick the winners.

My attitude is this. If Twitter won't let you say the kinds of things you want, go to a forum that does. But of course that's not what trolls like Milo want. They have no interest in echo chambers, because they fancy themselves provocateurs. They need to attach themselves to a wider audience that they can shock and irritate, and that way when they get called out, they can do their own version of "SJW", which is to whine like babies that they're being oppressed.

Re:Twitter isn't interest in stopping trolls unles

[elrous0]

Haven't you heard? It's impossible for an SJW to be a troll or harasser, since "troll" and "harasser" implies a power relationship, it's impossible for an SJW to be one (since they don't have any power on the social media platforms they now completely control). So the powerless SJW's who now have all the power on all social media CAN'T harass or troll. Only the powerful conservatives and liberal dissenters who have no power on any social media platforms have the power on social media to be trolls/racists/sexists/abusers.

Also, it's very important that we protect LGBT rights and the rights of Muslims who support killing LGBT's.

Re:Wake me up when they ban RealDonaldTrump

[epyT-R]

The real reason for the flack twitter gets is lack of honesty. If they only want progressive views expressed, they need to make it a policy/part of the TOS. Then everyone will know where they stand. No more passive-aggressive moderation of users who express contrarian political views. They'll be banned outright for TOS violation.

Re:They don't have a product

[Fragnet]

Oh sure, all those "blacklivesmatter" tweets are really civilised.

Re:trolling for clicks

[Crashmarik]

Besides, what the hell is Twitter good for anyway?

I've found that Twitter is good for answering the following sorts of questions:

Did I just feel an earthquake?

Did anyone else hear that explosion?

Is Netflix really down, or is it just me?

Etc.

RSS is even better for that, and on the plus side stupid people don't even realize it exists.

Re:Milo a Troll ?

[Opportunist]

Odd that you never heard about SJWs doxing and harrassing people, and I know of one case where they even tried to get someone fired for making counter arguments to their bullshit.

Re:raging asshole, maybe, but he is right you know

[Anonymous Coward]

He was removed because Twitter could only choose between pissing off the SJW crowd or the crowd following him. There was no middle ground for them Twitter could not win in this.

It's simply not true and you are on a site which proves it. The middle ground is to moderate them both down. Basically, any troll posts should be allowed, but should be very hard for people to find. Twitter is failing to do something which Slashdot has succeeded in doing for years. This is a clear sign of failure.

Re:raging asshole, maybe, but he is right you know

[hsthompson69]

Mod parent up. Regardless if you're an SJW, or a homosexual conservative, twitter has obviously created a double standard, and the problem isn't with what direction they've chosen (mobs from SJWs okay, mobs of conservatives not okay), but the fact that they chose a direction at all. The arbitrary nature of their actions should be a wakeup call to *anyone*, because tomorrow, it could be you.

What they should do is create "twitterleft.com" and "twitterright.com", and capture both audiences in their own spaces. Instead, they've at the very least disenchanted the people they censor plus a fair number of those who they don't censor but still care about censorship.

Re:trolling for clicks

[hairyfeet]

Its also SJW shit, they banned Milo for saying Leslie Jones looked like one of his ex boyfriends while they ignored Leslie Jones saying things like "is that (famous black entertainer) sitting with a white woman? I'll fuck that bitch up" "sick of white people shit" along with stupid white bitch this and dumb white muthafucka that. She hasn't even bothered to delete all her racist shit because she knows its SJW heaven, you can go on her Twitter right now and look that shit up.

They lost a LOT of users over the Milo mess because the one they took up for was not only so obviously horribly racist but even fucked up and accidentally sent a private tweet publicly showing she was trolling her own channel when she tweeted "I can stay on for awhile,loved the racist posts @PaulFieg" trying to drum up drama for her new ghostbusters shitshow. It would be one thing if they actually applied their policies fairly, but the Milo mess provided proof you can be as racist and scummy as you wanna be on Twitter...as long as you are the right skin color and the left side of the political aisle.

Re:raging asshole, maybe, but he is right you know

[DaHat]

You forgot about her whole punching down campaign in response, including trying to get her followers to harass some of her harassers (still a violation of Twitter rules, something Milo did not do): http://www.breitbart.com/big-h...

There are assholes online, and if you are a celeb you are probably going to get more than your fair share of them. It sucks, and after she stomped off after her own bullying, she returned.

Re:trolling for clicks

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

RSS is even better for that, and on the plus side stupid people don't even realize it exists.

RSS? I've never heard of- hey, wait a minute!!

Re:raging asshole, maybe, but he is right you know

[Pseudonym]

Basically, any troll posts should be allowed, but should be very hard for people to find. Twitter is failing to do something which Slashdot has succeeded in doing for years.

Not really, most of the Slashdot old guard has abandoned moderation and the trolls have taken over duties.

The best way to view Slashdot today would be to make invisible anything which has an equal number of +1 and -1 votes. If one troll faction hates it and the other troll faction loves it, it's probably not worth reading.

Re:raging asshole, maybe, but he is right you know

[Mandrel]

The best way to view Slashdot today would be to make invisible anything which has an equal number of +1 and -1 votes. If one troll faction hates it and the other troll faction loves it, it's probably not worth reading.

That touches on the problem of thumb-up/thumb-down moderation often turning into agree/disagree. Slashdot tried to avoid this by naming the different downmods. But this may becoming less effective as newer users moderate as thumbs.