| People are getting all caught up on the idea of censorship here but it is really about what Twitter is, and what does it want to be. Does Twitter want to be a dumb pipe where it doesn't do anything at all about what people post? If that is the case, then yeah, don't do anything about bots, trolls, harassment/abuse, etc. Is Twitter actually an online community? If that is what they want it to be, then it will need at least some mechanisms to deal with toxic users. Maybe that's just giving users robust tools for filtering what they want to see. Maybe you could use sentiment analysis to give people the ability to block certain types of tweets from reaching them. And indeed, they already have some of that with the 'sensitive content' setting on images and video. The author here wants to go further into a reputation system, which may or may not be the right choice for Twitter. That seems to be a harder thing to do technically, but I'm pretty sure they could come up with something that tones down the impact of the worst abuse. At the end of the day, if a general public social media platform becomes too toxic for too many users, it probably won't survive. And that's not even getting into the real world consequences that we're starting to see from foreign intelligence services attempting to manipulate them. |