[eropple]

Having concerted bombs of right-wing harassment drop on one's head for having the temerity to do something like "be a woman with political opinions" is not part of being an adult. And that's the reality of Twitter right now.

This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.

[iamatworknow]

The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation.

As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them.

Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?

[eropple]

> The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real (as in tangible) physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation.

Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.

Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.

Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.

[dotnetisnotdead]

The harassment from Twitter is everywhere on both sides of the political spectrum though. You're painting a very one sided picture. I'm not attacking you here I'm just saying there is a narrative about the "alt-right" harassing the innocent leftists and it's not the whole picture.

I'm a (democrat) mixed race woman, and I get more harassment and vitriol from "tolerant liberals" when I post anything remotely in support of the president than I ever do from "white supremacists or anti feminists". I have noticed if I don't go right down the party line on an issue, I'm attacked violently. The "N" word I get called frequently is Nazi, not the other.

I'm not trying to say your experiences are invalid, I believe you're experiencing it, but I think assigning it to one political party or movement is inaccurate. It's really just the culture of Twitter, and maybe society in general.

[makomk]

Yeah, the thing that's probably ultimately going to limit the life of Twitter's latest automated anti-abuse measures is that left-wingers who fire nasty, vitrolic, vulgarity-filled tweets and invitations to kill themselves at users on the right are also getting their accounts automatically put in time out or even suspended for it, and they're getting really pissed off about it. Sooner or later the press is going to get hold of a sufficiently sympathetic example and that'll be it.

[eropple]

If Twitter wants to show the alt-left tools the door too, I'm certainly not gonna cape up for them. But there is a difference of orders of magnitude in both size and cohesiveness to wrestle with here, and it's not towards the burned Bernie bros. That alt-left doesn't have members of state-blessed media outlets (well, until recently, when cheering on pedophilia became a little too much for them) on campus tours where he'd out trans people with a pack of jackals ready to pounce.

There's a difference of kind here.

[dotnetisnotdead]

You're kidding right? The right says a lot of stupid things...ok TONS of stupid things, but "left leaning media" isn't one of them. These media outlets may not be state blessed, but we have the media on our side, and we have our Jackals for sure. 99% of the media is leaning hard to the left on everything.

The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt, and he was targeted and destroyed by the jackals of the left.

Bill Maher was the arguable catalyst of it, and he said the exact same thing Milo did, and WORSE things in support of pedophilia and we didn't call him out for it. No media blitz, not cancelled events/shows/etc. Nope, Maher is a hero!

All that does is show the "values" we exited Milo with were not true because we don't apply those values to our own people.

[sidlls]

The media does not have a "hard left" bias. They have a "hard profit" bias. The most recent example is the 2016 election, in which they used an orange haired fascist and a right-leaning, conservative "new Democrat" to amplify their entertainment driven ratings (and ad revenue).

[nikdaheratik]

1) I don't believe what you said WRT to Bill Maher, and I don't even like him or watch his show.

2) People who don't like Milo, don't like him because he's a bully who encourages other people to doxx, harass, and otherwise target people who don't look or act the way he supposedly approves of. Also, most of what he does is just posturing for attention. If Milo found a way to make more money and get more attention doing offensive stuff for the other political "team" he would have.

3) Name one incident from the "left" on Twitter or elsewhere that stacks up to GamerGate, or the Leslie Jones harassment. It's not that they couldn't do such things, but it doesn't really fit with the way the Left likes to roll.

[eropple]

Bill Maher isn't a hero and is largely considered in the circles I run in to be the trashfire alt-left sort who I'd be happy to see the back of. He is emphatically not "my people" and never has been. So I'm not really sure what you're getting at there.

Yiannopoulos got a little more attention, which he wanted, because he decided to spend a lot of time being a scumbag to get people to look at him. And it bit him because that attention unearthed some real bad stuff. Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".

[Karunamon]

But there is a difference of orders of magnitude in both size and cohesiveness to wrestle with here

The most non-snarky way I can put this is: "Citation needed".

Something that is a left leaning/liberal phenomenon almost exclusively from my experiences is the propensity for shouting a statement into public, and then claiming that anyone who has the temerity to reply to their tweet with anything other than wholehearted agreement is "harassing them", and then immediately blocking them.

The right leaning/conservative types tend to argue back with you, perhaps using strong language. Conservatives tend to call you an idiot libtard sheep, liberals tend to call you a racist sexist bigot.

(This is one of the benefits of being centrist: both sides don't like you.)

This happens when replying to liberal leaning commenters with such regularity that I have taken to mentally rewriting "harass" to "disagree" in the context of Twitter.

I've been blocked and called a harasser on Twitter for calling shenanigans on a comment in a much more gentle way than I did above. Have I just harassed you? Twitter's community, and increasingly, their management, would say yes.

[dotnetisnotdead]

I relate to this 100%. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but in the last 2 years the culture has changed so drastically, I am being pushed to the center. I'm not alone in this, and it's bad for democrats. They don't realize it just yet.

The over use of "Bigot", "Racist", "Nazi", etc completely devalue the words. They take away their power. 10 years ago nobody wanted to be called a Nazi but now people laugh it off. That's dangerous. We want to be be afraid of being called a racist. We want to discourage it.

When Suzy soccer mom says she wants some stricter vetting for refugees she's not the same as Billy Bob sitting in his cabin planning out the burning of black churches. But the left has gone full throttle in that direction. They take the easy path of calling someone a name rather than defend their position, even if it's perfectly defensible.

These loud voices are drowning out the moderate, reasonable people on the left, and pushing them away. This is a bad long term strategy.

[dotnetisnotdead]

Also, when I see the media going crazy over Kellyanne putting her feet on the couch to take a picture, I can definitely see one of the biggest factors in how we've lost our way.

[dotnetisnotdead]

>Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.

To be completely fair, they will remove people for blatantly racist/sexist/homophobic tweets, and often do, where "f* white males" talk is completely allowed there.

[nyargh]

Won't someone think of the white males?

[dotnetisnotdead]

fighting racism and sexism with more racism and sexism should work out just fine.

[DaUR]

> I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.

> Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.

> Stop normalizing evil.

Your rhetoric is very emotional, and you want to use "abuse" a s an excuse to ban people who simply disagree with you ("anti-feminists", really?). I don't think people who share your views should be given the power to control discourse[0]. It's funny that you insult the "alt-left" ("bernie bros") when many would define the alt-left as the regressive left, in other words those who want to ban people simply because they disagree, like you're trying to do.

[0]: especially since you could argue that Twitter is the #1 platform for political discourse in the US, and is therefore vital for free speech (not as a legal obligation, but moral principle).

[iamatworknow]

These people have always existed. They will continue to exist. They will continue to find ways to harass the people they see as easy targets because they find enjoyment in it. Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.

For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play.

You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.

[Analemma_]

> You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.

This is analogous to all those arguments that "If you have nothing to hide, you have ", or, "If you want privacy, you always have the option to become a hermit and live completely off the grid with no contact with friends or family" What if I want privacy and to participate in modern society? Why should I have to choose?

It's the same here: Twitter, for all its faults, is very useful. Why should I have to choose between not using it and enduring a bunch of abuse on it, if Twitter can fix that? To protect the "right" of some anonymous shitheads to have victims be forced to listen to their harassment? Please.

You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.

> Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.

First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level. But even if it were true, it would not be a reason for Twitter not to attempt anything. Again, you're starting from entirely the wrong premises here.

[iamatworknow]

>You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.

Show me an example of where I said this. What I've been saying is that attempts to programmatically weed out this type of behavior and the accounts that people create to perpetuate it will ultimately be ineffective. What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?

>First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level.

Do you have an example?

[pjc50]

Metafilter?

> What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?

"We can do something, but it won't be completely effective, so we shouldn't do anything."

What's the use in vaccination? After all, it doesn't completely eliminate disease. Unless used very consistently for a lifetime.

[dotnetisnotdead]

I agree with this 100%. These types of people have been around for centuries, the only difference is now they have a mouthpiece and encouragement. Use your block button, it's free.

[epistasis]

One quibble: the block button is not free, it takes time, and we have limited time. Say, 60 presses/minute? When you have 3000 harassers, including many bots, is it worth spending nearly an hour blocking them?

There are third party tools that make the block button cost less, but it would be even better if they were built in to Twitter, and even better yet if the bot networks were not allowed.

[dotnetisnotdead]

Good point, I've never been harassed at that level before.

[eropple]

This post reveals a pretty significant misunderstanding of what Twitter is for marginalized communities. And, as such, this conversation is fruitless.

But one last thing: if it's as abhorrent as you seem to actually think it is, stop caping for them as being something that can't be stopped. Because you help them by doing so.

[iamatworknow]

>This post reveals a pretty significant misunderstanding of what Twitter is for marginalized communities. And, as such, this conversation is fruitless.

Okay, then please, "educate me". I'm not being sarcastic, either. I'm a middle class straight white man and I will freely admit that I don't understand the plight of many minority groups, and certainly not in the context of twitter or other social media. My beliefs are not set in stone, and I have never been dismissive of someone who has the desire to share their experience with me so I have a better understanding. Regardless of my understanding, though, I'm pretty sure I will still feel that removing oneself from a harmful environment is a pretty effective tool, regardless of the type of harm being put upon you.

What I see more often than not in this situation, however, are responses that are dismissive instead of educational -- like saying the conversation is fruitless. I have seen conversations like this come up before, where the "right wing" side, being much less moderate than I am (and I consider myself to be pretty liberal for the record), opens themselves up to learn more about the situation only to be met with responses like "I don't have time for this" or "educate yourself", which is about as effective as telling someone to RTFM. Only the manual is about someone else's beliefs and feelings, and it doesn't actually exist.

So please, if you have the time, tell me what I don't understand.

[eropple]

OK. I apologize for the tone of my comment; most of the time when somebody says what you said, they aren't looking to learn. And that's why people often respond with "educate yourself": because, in 2017, asking to be taught is often a rhetorical and political trap used against activists and marginalized people (how fucked is that?). It is a request for emotional investment that is used intentionally and maliciously by the white-supremacist types to do what I can only describe as gish-galloping at scale. Ask questions, get people who actually care about stuff to give a shit and to expend effort and emotional energy...and then burn it, "I was trolling you the whole time", that sort of thing. As you noted, these people don't have much to live for and wasting their time is okay if they waste other people's time. That's a victory to them.

The common response is "well, do it anyway," but the solution isn't for marginalized communities to be saints. It's for people like you and me to educate ourselves and work on this shit. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of AlterNet-type stuff, but this one encapsulates what I'm trying to say here: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/black_people_are_not_here_to...

-

A good place to start with regards to why social media matters with regards to marginalized groups (and it's really the obvious one) would be something like Black Twitter; it's a strong, pretty well-defined cultural group that discusses, at a wide and large scale, topics related to being black in America. It's a hugely influential cultural phenomenon and in a lot of ways it serves as a baseline political organization tool for those communities. The idea of telling marginalized people that they should refrain from participating in what is effectively the common social discourse among young people in 2017 because of their literal enemies who troll and harass specifically to make people not participate is...it presses some big red buttons in my head, because (also as a white dude) our space for "common social discourse" is pretty much anywhere we sit down, and that's not the case for others.

The Wikipedia page is surprisingly detailed and I think it's a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter

[tinus_hn]

Your list of groups you consider evil makes you look like a social justice warrior and derails the discussion while it is not relevant to your point.

[smacktoward]

If you were Twitter, why on Earth would you want the accepted answer to anybody's problems to be "don't use Twitter"? Your entire business model is built around getting people to use your service.

[iamatworknow]

And that's the problem that twitter needs to come to terms with and attempt to resolve, not the end user. I personally don't have faith that it is a solvable problem, at least not while still remaining an open platform. As long as anyone can sign up, "undesirables" will be among them.

The end user has precisely two options -- use twitter or don't. If using it causes you too much mental anguish, and twitter is incapable of making the experience better for you, then don't use it.

[smacktoward]

> And that's the problem that twitter needs to come to terms with and attempt to resolve, not the end user. I personally don't have faith that it is a solvable problem

So your advice for Twitter is to throw up their hands and close down their business?

I mean, it's easy for those of us outside the company to say "your product is fundamentally unfixable." But if you're inside the company, and the product as-is has giant problems that are keeping potential new users out and driving existing ones away, you have to try something. Your job literally depends on it.

Maybe the things they're trying now will work, maybe they won't. But as long as Twitter has employees and enough cash on hand to pay them, "just tell people to not use Twitter" is not advice anybody there is going to consider useful.

[iamatworknow]

>So your advice for Twitter is to throw up their hands and close down their business?

When did I start giving twitter advice? Nothing I've said in any of my responses in this thread was a suggestion of how twitter should operate their business. I hope they can get rid of all of the objectionable content and that everyone can be happy. I just don't think it's possible, and that the benefits of using twitter don't outweigh the abuse some people take, so it's not worth using.

[mikeash]

The fact that you're not forced to be on Twitter means that victims can leave, but it also means that bullies can be banned. Why prefer the first option?

[iamatworknow]

I'm not preferring either option. Of course they can be banned. But they will come back. They always do. Why subject yourself to that continuous cycle of stress?

[mikeash]

Because it's vastly preferable to driving away all the nice people and having your entire userbase be nothing but shitheads.

[nikdaheratik]

The real question to ask is: why are some of these political nuts working so hard to push people off of Twitter? The answer, in my opinion, is because it allows people they don't approve of the same public voice as themselves, for the first time ever in many cases.

[mason240]

Great, but then I get to decide who is in the second group.

[tinus_hn]

Indeed you do because you can set the rules for people trying to communicate with you yourself.

[jsemrau]

>The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"?

I would think it became a replacement for an RSS feed (with pictures and drama)

[intoverflow2]

> including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me"

How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?

[epistasis]

> when they try to engage with _anyone_ on the platform

But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block.

How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.

[eropple]

Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.

[liquidise]

What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.

[intoverflow2]

> I interact with people I know

I prefer have far less public services for this. Feels like airing dirty laundry to do it on twitter

[rhizome]

If "engage" means "HA HA U SUK TRUMP UR AZZ MAKE ME A SANDWICH" then maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them.

[strken]

What if engage means "I want to blow the whistle on something, can you get me in touch with a journalist?" for 0.01% of blocked messages and "u suk vote yrump" for the rest?

[nikdaheratik]

Well then there's email, phone, text message, snail mail, fax, carrier pigeon, whatever for that 0.01%.

[rhizome]

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" comes to mind.

[intoverflow2]

I clearly said not a harasser...

> maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them could have fooled me because if you built a platform purely for harassment it would resemble twitter closely

[moonshinefe]

I believe what he was getting at is as an adult, you should be able to realize that a website on the internet is just that--and have the ability to take it with a grain of salt without being highly offended / outraged.

I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.

[nikdaheratik]

And the point is that disagreement isn't what runs people off that platform. It's abusive behavior by large groups of people (and sometimes their bots) towards whoever they don't like.

[tomjen3]

Do you think Twitter should have a shared default blocklist?

That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big).

Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.

[eropple]

I think shared blocklists are great. As defaults, probably not. I don't use any shared lists because nobody's going to take a serious run at me, I just don't want to spike my blood pressure seeing the egg/anime smurf accounts well-actually at me.

But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.