[pmarreck]

It's actually a hard problem, similar to porn detection without using humans (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it). Blocking purely based on keywords or Bayesian filtering usually paints too broad a stroke and ends up limiting well-intended free speech (I once had a comment blocked for arguing AGAINST racism!). It's similar to the "blocking all mention of sex also blocks sex education" problem. It seems to take a fully-fleshed-out intelligence to grasp the true meaning behind even something as innocuous-looking as a written sentence.

Your assumption that people more intelligent than you "should have figured this out by now" belies the very problem- no one has yet come up with a good automated solution for this. If YOU do, you'll be a millionaire.

[freehunter]

Again, I disagree. Twitter came up with a way to make some posts more widely shown, and you're trying to tell me they don't have a way to make some posts less widely shown? As someone else said, if there are a lot of comments and few likes, don't put it in the trending feed. That's one solution for free, and I don't even work for Twitter. If it's two people having a conversation back and forth, the broader Twitter audience doesn't need to see it. It's not censored, it's not hidden, it's just not broadcast either.

People have become millionaires, billionaires even, for the exact opposite of what you say. You become rich by making sure controversial content is spread as far and wide as possible, because hatred and fear sell as entertainment. People get addicted to it. You don't become rich by filtering out hateful content, you become rich by enabling it and spreading it because that's what people want (as long as they're not the target).

[vincent-toups]

If you limit yourself merely to detecting abusive tweets, perhaps it is hard. But there are plenty of ways to adjust the way the social dynamics work that would decrease this kind of behavior but, I believe the argument goes, most of those would also decrease _engagement_.

The real problem is the incentives, both for Twitter and for people interacting on twitter. The solution is probably _social_ rather than technical, but as long as Twitter wants to keep your eyeballs on their site for as long as possible (so they can sell ads or whatever to advertisers) a whole host of solutions are going to be verboten.

By way of example, Hackernews literally has a feature to just lock you out of the site if you are using it more than you want to. That is great for us, the users. But twitter would never do such a thing.