“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

[calinewarkwc69]

This is such an important issue. I've quit twitter because the harassment is awful, the reporting procedures suck and take forever (like, you have to explain what about the tweet is breaking the rules, like you can't tell by the link, com'on.) and they always tell you there's nothing wrong. It's the worst and it's why they're plummeting right now.

[rainbows_]

It really is god awful. I follow someone on twitter who has reported harassment from a pedo creating new account after account saying disturbing things about her children and twitter responded that it wasn't violating their rules.

The only thing I can hope for is that someday a new twitter is created, by women and people of color, who understand about and treat harassment seriously and consider it a top priority.

[roseembolism]

Excellent article, which directly punts out that the major problem is that Twittter was created by white men who've never dealt with harassment, and who value free speech over anything else.

Based on that, I don't seeTwitter getting better, only worse. The trolls and harrassers have won.

[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

[blackjedii]

Eeyup. And Id add that the outrage and harassment is itself a niche market. So depending on who is soing it... Twitter has zero incentive to make it stop

[blackjedii]

I like how my mobile now has this freaky double-post thing going on. It's so weird.

[ladycyndra]

I was wondering what was going on. lol

[blackjedii]

Eeyup. And Id add that the outrage and harassment is itself a niche market. So depending on who is soing it... Twitter has zero incentive to make it stop