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by Analemma_ 3398 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

>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?

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.

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

Nice straw man. Again, where did I say that twitter shouldn't do anything?

Well then what exactly are you saying? From what I can see, it's either: "what Twitter is doing is useless so they should do nothing" or "banning people is bad because they'll continue to be abusive". Neither of these seems like a good argument to make.
I'm saying a "safe space" on a public (as in anyone can sign up without being vetted in some way) online service is not possible. Full stop. I never said twitter shouldn't do anything and I never said banning people is bad. To come to those conclusions based on my comments shows either a lack of reading comprehension skills or simply approaching them with your own biased predisposition that anyone who disagrees with you in some way disagrees with you in every way (an unfortunate and disgustingly common occurrence these days).

I'm suggesting to people who use these services that they should tamper their expectations about what can be done. Twitter will never be a "safe space". Can it be safer with some effort on their end? Maybe, but don't ever expect it to be a platform free from judgement about the beliefs you share, nor will it ever be free from those who would threaten or harass you for having those beliefs.