[cmdkeen]

There is a commercial one. Twitter doesn't have to allow them to carry on in this fashion, and it is a massive enabler of trolls. It's attitude towards online abuse is shockingly neglectful.

Trolls will always act, but that doesn't mean we have to put up with letting them use the some of the most powerful communications mediums of all time to do so.

Twitter has a massive pulpit to make statements that influence social change. Deleting the weev account won't stop him, but would make a very powerful pronouncement about what the company views as unacceptable behaviour, would diminish his "credibility" and change the narrative.

[waterlesscloud]

That doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to other venues.

[arrrg]

If by not solve the problem you mean not completely eliminate, then yeah. Of course. Obviously.

What’s with all this binary thinking? It’s completely non-sensical and irrelevant. Twitter is an important tool for communication for many people, so if harassing people gets harder there it makes it easier for those people, even if the harassers move elsewhere. In other places they do get less direct access, so their impact is diminished, even if they put in just as much work.

[waterlesscloud]

Sure, of course the harassers can't attack people directly on Twitter if they're banned from Twitter.

But what the article is talking about is also doxxing, sending things to physical addresses, etc, which are by far the more distressing elements of harassing.

Kicking people off Twitter does nothing to stop or even slow those things down.

It's not "binary thinking", so please don't try to dismiss it as such. It's acknowledging that the simple answers don't solve the worst aspects of the problem.

[arrrg]

It is binary thinking, though. A is not completely effective, so it’s completely worthless. That’s bullshit.

Obviously, for this there is no technical solution. But Twitter (and reddit) currently do a really, really shitty job and they have to do so, so much better. They make it worse.

The lasting solution is for everyone to shun harassers (if anyone you know does it, approach them, tell them to stop in no uncertain terms, always) and to shun enablers (those who downplay or minimise the effects). That’s really obvious, too, but obviously also a hard problem to solve.

[wpietri]

Banning those people from Twitter would do plenty.

Every bit of harm makes things worse. Ergo, every time we eliminate some bit of harm, we make things better.

The Twitter harassment is obviously material, because a) many accounts of harassment mention it clearly, and b) the harassers do it because it works.

Further, the harassment shows obvious patterns of escalation. It is entirely reasonable to believe that if the harassers get no oxygen on Twitter, there will be less escalation.

[cmdkeen]

It's much harder to use Reddit to issue a death threat to someone when they don't use Reddit. Twitter especially is a tool for magnifying hate in a way that other venues just aren't. The article specifically mentions instances of weev's tweets appearing in her timeline due to retweets, Twitter suggesting she follow him.

[McDoku]

Status is attention. If enough people stare at a fool he will be convinced he is king.

There are dollars in spectacle but in the end twitter, fb, reddit or HN are inferior tools because of this.