“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment

[rainbows_]

For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people who’ve been trying

Comments

[screamingintune]

maybe I just don't use twitter enough (I use it entirely to live tweet baseball games pretty much), but I feel like this is a problem with ALL social media platforms -- LJ, tumblr, Facebook, all of which I've used more than twitter -- have not been particularly effect at tamping down harassment, either.

[blackjedii]

It is a problem for all of them but Twitter is the only one that propogates super quickly with no way to exert some control

[ponyboy]

lj will ban your ip after three strikes. tumblr will also ip ban you but it takes forever. twitter does nothing of the sort.

[screamingintune]

I guess just haven't spent enough time on twitter to really know it well as a platform

[lovedforaday]

and LJ is quick about nuking accounts of banned users sneaking back if they're aware of them.

[wuvvumsoc]

Unfortunately for tumblr it seems rare for them to actually lift a finger on issues unless they are law breaking. I've made reports for harassment, stalking, death threats, and I also reported a guy who was soliciting users on tumblr to submit revenge porn of their ex-girlfriends and tumblr did nothing about it. I've only seen tumblr delete a drug dealer's blog so far after reporting it (and I am not sure if they turn over information about them to the DEA). So tumblr's pretty bad at that as well.

[wuvvumsoc]

From what I heard Facebook has the least amount of harassment but that's because they encourage their users to use their real face and real name so there's a bit of social accountability there. Obviously not everyone is going to do that, but if you are using facebook to connect with your family, friends and coworkers chances are you might actually try to self-monitor.