Twitter says ‘we hear you’ but doesn’t do anything
8:02 am - July 30th 2013
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In a message posted last night to its blog, Twitter said ‘we hear you‘.
But there was a curious lack of proposals.
The site has been under fierce criticism for not doing enough to tackle the barrage of violent abuse women have faced on the social networking site.
The blog post stated:
At Twitter, we work every day to create products that can reach every person on the planet. To do that, we must take a wide range of use cases into consideration when designing interfaces or developing user tools. We want Twitter to work whether you are trying to follow your favourite musician, talk to others about shared interests, or raise the visibility of a human rights issue.
We also have to think about scale and volume. We see an incredible amount of activity passing through our systems – there are more than 400 million Tweets sent every day worldwide. Those Tweets not only appear on our site and in our apps, but are also embedded into the fabric of traditional and digital media.
The vast majority of these use cases are positive. That said, we are not blind to the reality that there will always be people using Twitter in ways that are abusive and may harm others.
While manually reviewing every Tweet is not possible due to Twitter’s global reach and level of activity, we use both automated and manual systems to evaluate reports of users potentially violating our Twitter Rules. These rules explicitly bar direct, specific threats of violence against others and use of our service for unlawful purposes, for which users may be suspended when reported.
To the extent that our system is based around the filing of reports with our Trust & Safety team, we strive to make it easier and more practical to file them. Three weeks ago, we rolled out the ability to file reports from an individual Tweet on our iPhone app and the mobile version of our site, and we plan to bring this functionality to Android and desktop web users.
We are constantly talking with our users, advocacy groups, and government officials to see how we can improve Twitter, and will continue to do so. Such feedback has always played an important role in the development of our service. We hope the public understands the balances we’re trying to strike as we continue to work to make our systems and processes better.
In other words the only thing Twitter can offer its users is a system to file (a long) report from iPhones, and a promise to bring this to Android too. No more. Ridiculous.
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Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
· Other posts by Sunny Hundal
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Reader comments
What’s ridiculous is that the silly season is being used to campaign for censorship. Don’t fall for it.
a “long” form? It appears to be exactly as long as it should be for reporting someone, if it’s the same form they have here: https://support.twitter.com/forms/abusiveuser
I’m not sure what Twitter are supposed to do about this. If a crime is committed it’s a matter for the police surely. It’s like railing at God for allowing mugging on the streets.
I’m totally with George.
Sunny, if you reckon Twitter has some kind of ‘insytant magic bullet’ to deal with the problem of abuse, then it’s more complex than that. For example:
Is the demand simply for an easier way to report abuse, or is it for Twitter to actively police tweets more heavily – to ban more users, to pro-actively delete tweets, to react quicker, etc? How should it work in a real-time environment? Should users be instantly banned, or should there be a series of warnings before action is taken? Is there a right of appeal? Should there be consequences for frivolous or malicious abuse reports? How do you prevent the system being gamed to shut people down (as the “report spam” button already is)?
And that’s just one set of issues. And that’s just to do with Twitter in the UK/English: Was passiert wenn man auf Deutsch schreibt?
The form linked to at #2 seems pretty reasonable.
Instant “offence” buttons don’t seem a great idea, even though we all seem to take instant offence these days.
How much would people be willing to pay to use twitter? Enough to fund a crack team of thousands of multi-lingual moderators to monitor and react in real time?
The problem (for me at any rate) of a report abuse button is:
1) lots of these flames come from single use, disposable accounts
2) ironically would be open to abuse itself
“Detectives on Operation Weeting have identified a further suspected conspiracy to intercept telephone voicemails by a number of employees”
Masonic “TAU” Police force + weeting = T_weeting
—————————————–
Instant “offence” buttons
(O+F+F=666 in hebrew numerology
– “THE OFFICE” geddit?)
New World Order Zionist-Masons will use that to cover up any ‘truths’ written to warn about about their evil, satanic, takeover + progress.
@ (5) RedPesto: Well said. There are some very complicated points involved, not least the question of when one person’s trenchantly expressed opinion becomes abuse in the eyes of another. Who is to judge? I have some sympathy with Twitter’s current position.
In the meantime I commend your link to Flashboy’s post as a useful examination of some of the issues which need to be considered.
Misogynistic abuse isn’t a Twitter problem, it’s an arsehole problem.
I hear a lot of complaining about Twitter not doing enough but very little in the way of suggestions as to what they could actually do. The only suggestions I have heard will either be ridiculously ineffective, onerously censoring or both.
Any illegal stuff (i.e. threats) is a matter for the courts. I’m not sure Twitter can be blamed for abusive tweets any more than BT can be blamed for abusive phone calls.
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