As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them.

Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?

Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.

Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.

Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.

I'm a (democrat) mixed race woman, and I get more harassment and vitriol from "tolerant liberals" when I post anything remotely in support of the president than I ever do from "white supremacists or anti feminists". I have noticed if I don't go right down the party line on an issue, I'm attacked violently. The "N" word I get called frequently is Nazi, not the other.

I'm not trying to say your experiences are invalid, I believe you're experiencing it, but I think assigning it to one political party or movement is inaccurate. It's really just the culture of Twitter, and maybe society in general.

There's a difference of kind here.

The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt, and he was targeted and destroyed by the jackals of the left.

Bill Maher was the arguable catalyst of it, and he said the exact same thing Milo did, and WORSE things in support of pedophilia and we didn't call him out for it. No media blitz, not cancelled events/shows/etc. Nope, Maher is a hero!

All that does is show the "values" we exited Milo with were not true because we don't apply those values to our own people.

2) People who don't like Milo, don't like him because he's a bully who encourages other people to doxx, harass, and otherwise target people who don't look or act the way he supposedly approves of. Also, most of what he does is just posturing for attention. If Milo found a way to make more money and get more attention doing offensive stuff for the other political "team" he would have.

3) Name one incident from the "left" on Twitter or elsewhere that stacks up to GamerGate, or the Leslie Jones harassment. It's not that they couldn't do such things, but it doesn't really fit with the way the Left likes to roll.

Yiannopoulos got a little more attention, which he wanted, because he decided to spend a lot of time being a scumbag to get people to look at him. And it bit him because that attention unearthed some real bad stuff. Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".

Curious. Looks like there's a lack of clear definitions here, because when I hear "alt-left" (or "control-left" as Maajid Nawaz likes to say) to me that means the SJW types who are quick to accuse anyone they disagree with as being a "bigot" or whatever. Maher seems pretty firmly against that.

>Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".

Not really worth curating all the questionable left-wing folks major outlets have on staff or let write editorials, but it does seem odd to cite Yoo, here, since arguably that would be an example of the NYT trying to be objective and let you hear the otherside instead of just telling you what to think (FWIW he seems to be a Trump critic, so that aligns well with the NYT editoral board right now). I prefer the former.

The most non-snarky way I can put this is: "Citation needed".

Something that is a left leaning/liberal phenomenon almost exclusively from my experiences is the propensity for shouting a statement into public, and then claiming that anyone who has the temerity to reply to their tweet with anything other than wholehearted agreement is "harassing them", and then immediately blocking them.

The right leaning/conservative types tend to argue back with you, perhaps using strong language. Conservatives tend to call you an idiot libtard sheep, liberals tend to call you a racist sexist bigot.

(This is one of the benefits of being centrist: both sides don't like you.)

This happens when replying to liberal leaning commenters with such regularity that I have taken to mentally rewriting "harass" to "disagree" in the context of Twitter.

I've been blocked and called a harasser on Twitter for calling shenanigans on a comment in a much more gentle way than I did above. Have I just harassed you? Twitter's community, and increasingly, their management, would say yes.

The over use of "Bigot", "Racist", "Nazi", etc completely devalue the words. They take away their power. 10 years ago nobody wanted to be called a Nazi but now people laugh it off. That's dangerous. We want to be be afraid of being called a racist. We want to discourage it.

When Suzy soccer mom says she wants some stricter vetting for refugees she's not the same as Billy Bob sitting in his cabin planning out the burning of black churches. But the left has gone full throttle in that direction. They take the easy path of calling someone a name rather than defend their position, even if it's perfectly defensible.

These loud voices are drowning out the moderate, reasonable people on the left, and pushing them away. This is a bad long term strategy.

Baffled me to watch Americans stumble into the exact same mistake the Brexit Remain campaign did. Calling people nazis and racists for having what they believe are moderate opinions does not make them sit back and re-evaluate it instead just solidifies their stance and they begin to shrug off being called racist.

I don't disagree with most of your post--but in the land of the real, it is very difficult to say that vetting for refugees in the United States is not already an intensely strict process. The people asserting it's not are self-described nationalists who wish to stop immigration...or are sourcing what they're saying from them. That's where the meme (in the original sense of the word, not the 4chan sense of it) comes from. Your hypothetical soccer mom is getting this from dog-whistle sources because she listens to them and can hear the frequency. In today's political climate, that is basically a lost cause. The epistemic closure is real; you're not clawing that person back. (Some of them--myself included, years back--will eventually find their way out. But you gotta want it and nothing anybody outside the bubble does or says will make it happen.) It's not a fight to turn people, and to be honest I don't think throwing good money after bad makes sense. (I advise ignoring these people entirely, not trying to argue with them or teach them because you don't have the hooks into that person that the news sources they choose to pay attention to do.

Instead, it's a fight to turn our people out. And I'd agree that picking on randoms doesn't help turnout. But one thing I'd caution about is that what you're saying is very frequently extended to everybody not merely randos. "That literal fascist is a literal fascist, he checks all the 'what is a fascist?' boxes and he's down with Richard Spencer" still needs to be said. Though I'll decry my liberal forebears' willingness to use the word to mis-describe earlier generations of Republicans. Because we are in a real bad place and the literal fascists are actually at the gates. And in the White House.

(The deeper concern, and that's why it's a turnout fight, is gerrymandering by overwhelmingly right-wing/Republican/there's-not-really-a-difference-anymore groups in order to crack and pack those who don't vote for them. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish...)

I see your overall point, but the problem with the assertion here is Suzy's opinion is WRONG, not just different and it must be wrong because of where she gets her information. So you take that and then amplify it a little and you get "Suzy is a Nazi" and that's where everything breaks down.

Suzy may not be wrong, and may have a valid opinion based on her own personal research or experience but that's unacceptable to the left of today. Everything is absolute and if Suzy doesn't agree with it, she is wrong and watches too much Fox News! Dog Whistles! Gaslighting! Facism!

It's not just the left that does this of course, but as a member of the team I feel disenfranchised when it happens.

Agreed.

> The people asserting it's not are self-described nationalists who wish to stop immigration...or are sourcing what they're saying from them.

Here I disagree. A big chunk of it is people who think that nothing bad should ever happen, and if any refugee ever does anything bad, that proves that refugees are not adequately vetted, and we have to do something. They may then listen to the self-described nationalists, but that's not where they start.

And it seems to me that writing off all the people who disagree with you is not a winning strategy. (A whining strategy, perhaps, but that's not the same thing...)

You're going to have to persuade them, or you're going to have to live with them (and their votes). And you don't like the consequences of their votes.

> Because we are in a real bad place and the literal fascists are actually at the gates. And in the White House.

Yup. At least as advisors. (I'm not willing to place Trump himself in that literal category, at least not yet.)

Those people may exist. I don't think, if that's their base axiom, they are practically (in a world where we have scarcity of time and effort) reachable. Convincing somebody to change their axioms is...well...not a particularly good investment of time.

> And it seems to me that writing off all the people who disagree with you is not a winning strategy.

This is pretty much what Republicans have been doing for a very long time, and doing pretty well at the levels that matter (i.e., state legislatures and Congress). They have not tacked to the middle, they have not tried to drum up moderate voters. They've kept their people and they have whipped them into a frenzy to vote to the point where gun-to-head obstinacy (the debt ceiling comes to mind) is a positive that rewards them even when moderates are aghast.

Turnout fights aren't won from the middle. You can have the occasional figure who appeals to the middle--Obama, I think, is one such figure--but I don't think that is replicable at scale. And the problem is at scale. There really are more of us than there are of them; ours just don't get out and vote. (And there are efforts by the party in power to make that continue.)

> At least as advisors.

To be clear, I agree. (I don't think Trump has a political position. I know Bannon and Miller do.)

On reflection, I may have to agree with you here. It's an emotional axiom, not a rational one, and so you can't fix it by rational argument. (You might be able to fix it by emotional argument, but I'm not sure even that would work, nor do I know how to go about trying.)

> This is pretty much what Republicans have been doing for a very long time, and doing pretty well...

But it seems to me that the Democrats (or at least the left wing of the party) has been doing the same. The message has been, if you don't agree with us, you're a racist, sexist bigot, and you should just shut up and crawl in a hole (or die). And it turned out that (pick one): The Republican base was bigger, or the Democrats alienated more people, or the Republicans alienated them less.

> There really are more of us than there are of them; ours just don't get out and vote.

If by "ours" you mean Democrats (as opposed to centrists), then I'd say that Hillary was a very uninspiring candidate. Also, when the DNC chose to hinder Bernie, it turned off a lot of Democratic voters.

> I don't think Trump has a political position.

I don't, either. I hope that's good news - if Bannon and Miller prove to be political albatrosses, Trump is somewhat likely to jettison them. (The bad news is that Trump, not having positions of his own, is more susceptible to the positions of those around him.)

The repeal of campaign finance-> Lots of state legislatures going hard Republican-> New laws to limit voting rights and more gerrymandering

You can argue that one side needs to stop tone policing all you want, but the reality is that candidates are losing in states they used to win because the people who were voting for them aren't allowed to vote anymore. [edit] Most people who vote aren't listening to most liberals or whoever in their day-to-day conversations about this stuff anyway.

To be completely fair, they will remove people for blatantly racist/sexist/homophobic tweets, and often do, where "f* white males" talk is completely allowed there.

> Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.

> Stop normalizing evil.

Your rhetoric is very emotional, and you want to use "abuse" a s an excuse to ban people who simply disagree with you ("anti-feminists", really?). I don't think people who share your views should be given the power to control discourse[0]. It's funny that you insult the "alt-left" ("bernie bros") when many would define the alt-left as the regressive left, in other words those who want to ban people simply because they disagree, like you're trying to do.

[0]: especially since you could argue that Twitter is the #1 platform for political discourse in the US, and is therefore vital for free speech (not as a legal obligation, but moral principle).

For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play.

You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.

This is analogous to all those arguments that "If you have nothing to hide, you have ", or, "If you want privacy, you always have the option to become a hermit and live completely off the grid with no contact with friends or family" What if I want privacy and to participate in modern society? Why should I have to choose?

It's the same here: Twitter, for all its faults, is very useful. Why should I have to choose between not using it and enduring a bunch of abuse on it, if Twitter can fix that? To protect the "right" of some anonymous shitheads to have victims be forced to listen to their harassment? Please.

You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.

> Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.

First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level. But even if it were true, it would not be a reason for Twitter not to attempt anything. Again, you're starting from entirely the wrong premises here.

Show me an example of where I said this. What I've been saying is that attempts to programmatically weed out this type of behavior and the accounts that people create to perpetuate it will ultimately be ineffective. What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?

>First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level.

Do you have an example?

> What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?

"We can do something, but it won't be completely effective, so we shouldn't do anything."

What's the use in vaccination? After all, it doesn't completely eliminate disease. Unless used very consistently for a lifetime.

Nice straw man. Again, where did I say that twitter shouldn't do anything?

I'm suggesting to people who use these services that they should tamper their expectations about what can be done. Twitter will never be a "safe space". Can it be safer with some effort on their end? Maybe, but don't ever expect it to be a platform free from judgement about the beliefs you share, nor will it ever be free from those who would threaten or harass you for having those beliefs.

There are third party tools that make the block button cost less, but it would be even better if they were built in to Twitter, and even better yet if the bot networks were not allowed.

I had tweeted something pretty innocuous to a journalist after the election. I wasn't screaming about an illegitimate president or anything of the sort, it was something like, "Maybe we should look at adding more members of congress, it would smooth out the electoral college and make for better representation."

Several months later, some random right-wing asshole with 50,000+ followers retweeted my comment and said something like "Hillary supporters just won't get over losing!"

Within minutes I was absolutely inundated with his moron followers / bots. Literally hundreds of responses calling me a butthurt Liberal and going through my old comments so that I couldn't just block that one.

Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time? None of those people followed me, they knew nothing of me or my politics, they just blindly chase whatever signal their 'leaders' choose to amplify.

I can't, because in such a situation I would just delete my account. Spending your time responding to or blocking and reporting all of them would be maddening, for sure, but that is what gives them their "power". It's easier to click only one or two buttons and just be done with it all. Let them have their little victory. Don't let some app be the doorway through which people can try to hurt you.

A fun way to pass the time, yeah. A way to keep current with what's going on in the real time, sure. But the more personally invested you are in such a thing and the more you open up your private life and thoughts to strangers, the more devastated you will be when things go south.

Of course, even if it's not a personal identity, that's not enough to stop certain people from attacking the Twitter user's personal life.

You seem to be arguing to not use Twitter, which is just fine, I don't think it's necessary at all in my life. But I think a lot of people find a lot of value in the platform, and when there's something of value, I can see why a lot of people would rather try to keep Twitter useful rather than just abandon it entirely.

This particular issue seems ripe for a technological fix from Twitter. It should be possible to tweak your privacy settings in such a way that you can turn down noise and only focus on the tweets you are interested in. Maybe it's just my naivete as a non-user, but it seems like adding a couple of settings would help you weather such a storm:

- allow tweets only from people you follow

- allow tweets only from people you've already tweeted at

- temp-block all non-followed accounts that tweeted you in the last X hours

I think asking Twitter to fix the much larger problem of "eliminating assholes from the Internet" is counterproductive. Twitter's inherent design is flawed as it is essentially a single loud public forum, but they can at least provide you tools to handle the worst cases of spam.

But one last thing: if it's as abhorrent as you seem to actually think it is, stop caping for them as being something that can't be stopped. Because you help them by doing so.

Okay, then please, "educate me". I'm not being sarcastic, either. I'm a middle class straight white man and I will freely admit that I don't understand the plight of many minority groups, and certainly not in the context of twitter or other social media. My beliefs are not set in stone, and I have never been dismissive of someone who has the desire to share their experience with me so I have a better understanding. Regardless of my understanding, though, I'm pretty sure I will still feel that removing oneself from a harmful environment is a pretty effective tool, regardless of the type of harm being put upon you.

What I see more often than not in this situation, however, are responses that are dismissive instead of educational -- like saying the conversation is fruitless. I have seen conversations like this come up before, where the "right wing" side, being much less moderate than I am (and I consider myself to be pretty liberal for the record), opens themselves up to learn more about the situation only to be met with responses like "I don't have time for this" or "educate yourself", which is about as effective as telling someone to RTFM. Only the manual is about someone else's beliefs and feelings, and it doesn't actually exist.

So please, if you have the time, tell me what I don't understand.

The common response is "well, do it anyway," but the solution isn't for marginalized communities to be saints. It's for people like you and me to educate ourselves and work on this shit. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of AlterNet-type stuff, but this one encapsulates what I'm trying to say here: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/black_people_are_not_here_to...

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A good place to start with regards to why social media matters with regards to marginalized groups (and it's really the obvious one) would be something like Black Twitter; it's a strong, pretty well-defined cultural group that discusses, at a wide and large scale, topics related to being black in America. It's a hugely influential cultural phenomenon and in a lot of ways it serves as a baseline political organization tool for those communities. The idea of telling marginalized people that they should refrain from participating in what is effectively the common social discourse among young people in 2017 because of their literal enemies who troll and harass specifically to make people not participate is...it presses some big red buttons in my head, because (also as a white dude) our space for "common social discourse" is pretty much anywhere we sit down, and that's not the case for others.

The Wikipedia page is surprisingly detailed and I think it's a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter

The end user has precisely two options -- use twitter or don't. If using it causes you too much mental anguish, and twitter is incapable of making the experience better for you, then don't use it.

So your advice for Twitter is to throw up their hands and close down their business?

I mean, it's easy for those of us outside the company to say "your product is fundamentally unfixable." But if you're inside the company, and the product as-is has giant problems that are keeping potential new users out and driving existing ones away, you have to try something. Your job literally depends on it.

Maybe the things they're trying now will work, maybe they won't. But as long as Twitter has employees and enough cash on hand to pay them, "just tell people to not use Twitter" is not advice anybody there is going to consider useful.

When did I start giving twitter advice? Nothing I've said in any of my responses in this thread was a suggestion of how twitter should operate their business. I hope they can get rid of all of the objectionable content and that everyone can be happy. I just don't think it's possible, and that the benefits of using twitter don't outweigh the abuse some people take, so it's not worth using.

I would think it became a replacement for an RSS feed (with pictures and drama)

How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?

But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block.

How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.

I prefer have far less public services for this. Feels like airing dirty laundry to do it on twitter

> maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them could have fooled me because if you built a platform purely for harassment it would resemble twitter closely

I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.

That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big).

Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.

But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.