[regal]

She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to come up with this.

"Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button.

"The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been.

"Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them."

-----------------

Two thoughts:

One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic.

Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.

[gabemart]

>a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored

A la "Flag for spam" on youtube comments. I would hesitantly estimate that perhaps 1% of comments which appear with a "This has been flagged as spam" warning are actually spam.

[brador]

It looks to me like they want customer service on a free service.

[6d0debc071]

If people didn't want services on free services, then the people who were using them to make money would be up the creek. Adding 'customer' in front of that concept doesn't change the underlying relationship.

[brador]

Human customer service doesn't scale well. The number of false flags Twitter will get on this report button is non trivial. Most people are assholes when they get power, and that report button is power. It will be used by some to remove people they don't like from Twitter. We've seen the same on other services (youtube), and we'll see it here.

[scholia]

We have computers that block spam, remove content from Google's index, drive cars and win at Jeopardy. They could certainly remove a lot of abuse, and that would be worth doing.

I'm not convinced it would result in wrongly removing a lot of people, since there is some form of karma in the number of followers and the number of lists someone is on.

Of course, it would be nice to have some recourse to an independent appeal if something goes wrong. However, Google manages without one (1), and its decisions can have devastating personal and financial consequences. That's not the case with Twitter, where there is no real barrier to creating accounts. Including spam accounts.

(1) Unless you happen to be buddies with someone at Google.

[6d0debc071]

> Human customer service doesn't scale well.

Mmm, well, there you're changing your argument on me ^_^;

Okay, let's talk about that instead. Problems: False positives, (from whose perspective?) low staff to customer ratio.

Potential solutions:

Recruit volunteer staff

Pros: More staff. Cons: Some of them are going to be evil.

Let users report people they don't want to hear from (as you point out, this is how it will work)

Pros: Reduces staff tasks Cons: Again, might be used for evil

So, essentially what we seem to be looking at with the above problems is a trust issue. If you give people binary access to total power, even on a probabilistic basis as per the report function, then it's going to be abuse.

Potential solutions:

Give people more limited forms of power than banning and not banning.

Pros: - varies Cons: Less deterrents?

How might we do that?

Potential solutions: Let people ban others from their accounts.

Pros: No longer have to worry about people who just don't like someone banning them. Cons: Loses a lot of the social deterrent effect, people who joke about rape probably don't care about continuing to talk to the person they're attacking anyway. Cons: Doesn't let you network with people who are likely to share your values, so you'll get exposed to attacks anyway.

(This seems to be the current state of affairs - I don't really use twitter so I don't know, but suggestions on pages seem to imply it.)

If we solve the second problem there, the first one becomes less of an issue. At this point it starts to look like a networking and evidence problem. If we have ban groups - that you can join or unjoin as you please, to make abuse less likely, and have each individual user's decisions absolutely override any group level decision for their account.

Okay, what are the potential problems with that?

How would you vote?

If someone's banned from one person's account gets banned from all of them, then as the group increases the power of any individual within that group will increase.

Require more than one person to make a decision to get rid of someone?

How do we stop groups of thugs just voting to shut someone up?

Choose a representative sample? Say by forwarding the reported post to three people within the group and having them all sign off on it.

Downside is you duplicate work - upside is you reduce the potential for them all to be evil - and if the group itself is evil then it's not a group that people would want to be part of anyway.

How do you keep trolls out? If the group consistently votes against your reports, then your reports stop being received?

==========================

I don't know, admittedly this isn't my area and this is like ten minutes thought. But it doesn't seem to me like an absolutely unsolvable problem as much as it seems a bit tricky.

[brador]

The situation for Twitter is messy no matter what they do. A report link also opens them up to a tiny liability of 'I reported it and you did nothing', so they'll likely default to leaning on ban first ask questions later. Again, just like Youtube has. Messy, but interesting to follow what they do.

[esalman]

A 'free' service that treats its users like products and makes money off them?

[Dewie]

One possible solution might be to only let people that have registered with their real name report abuse easily, and they can report anyone (real name or not). These are the people who people can easily track down, so death threats are much more frightening to receive for these people. They will probably abuse the report function less since they feel like they are interacting in an open public space with their real identity, and I guess they might be easier to ban from the service if they abuse it.

The problem would be to find out who is actually registering with real names, but I think Facebook have done this for a while now. It shouldn't be a problem for people that are a bit famous, and with the lopsided amount of people on Twitter that are followed compared to the whole userbase, I guess it might mostly be decently famous people that would have the want or need to register with their real names.