This is a cop-out. You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do. If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source). And I'm an unimportant software developer. What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity. You might as well tell them "quit walking on the street, or wear a burka, and you won't get harassed or assaulted." It would be the same cop-out. We have police to keep the streets safe. We need Twitter to be safe too.
In theory agree keeping things safe seems great, but I struggle with the idea that we can define "safe" in a way that is reasonable and makes sense, and where the punishment is effective and reasonable.
The vast majority of times I have seen claims of harassment, the usual process is that someone makes a controversial statement, then realises the group that objects was larger than they imagined as they receive hundreds and thousands objections, some of which are almost certainly awful. I understand how that can feel like harassment when 10,000 people tweet at you, and in 10,000 tweets half a dozen are guaranteed to sound batshit insane and downright scary, but it isn't harassment to be disagreed with, nor to have ideas that you promote subject to scrutiny.
SM amplifies what that scrutiny looks like massively, but pure numbers don't constitute harassment. Nor does people watching everything you say and commenting on it. And this is where it gets tough, nor does having people say mean things about you, because mean is just so subjective.
Any definition of harassment is really tricky, and a definition of "safe" is even more difficult, and we haven't even got to the punishment part yet.
Ultimately, the idea we can stop people disagreeing, and disagreeing passionately enough to border on troubling, is impossible, and what is needed is a something proactive an individual can do to protect themselves.
And I have no idea what that is!
People have a right to be safe in the real world. Harassing someone physically or verbally as they're walking down the street for wearing religious clothing or a short skirt is completely unacceptable and makes people not feel safe in their own neighbourhood. It's not possible to anonymise yourself in real life.
That's completely different from having someone send you a nasty message on the internet. Completely different.
Twitter is safe. Nobody can harm you through Twitter. It's simply impossible to harm you through Twitter. What people can do is send you nasty messages through Twitter. You have two solutions:
1. Stop using Twitter, an utterly worthless dis-service that has never produced anything of value, or
2. Get over yourself and grow a thicker skin.
>You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do.
No, you don't. You think you do, but you don't. The only people that 'need Twitter' are 'social media' people and quite frankly they're the worst part of Twitter.
>If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source).
No you don't. Twitter is not a good way to connect to anyone. Nobody can have any sort of technical discussion through Twitter without completely subverting Twitter's model through hacks like multi-tweet messages, self-replying, twitlonger, etc. Twitter has never been, is not and never will be a good platform for discussing anything. Use email, like the adult you claim to be.
>What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity.
Don't use Twitter. Female journalists have existed for a very long time, much (much) longer than Twitter, and the vast majority of them don't use Twitter. Twitter is a shitty, toxic platform. It's not some sort of official place. It's not a public service. It's not part of our culture. It's a shitty social media site that you should stay away from.
Twitter is not useful to journalists. Twitter is not useful to entertainers (and you'd be a fool to think that hate mail to celebrities didn't exist before twitter. They employed people to filter and reply to their fan/hate mail before, they can employ people to filter and reply to their fan/hate tweets now).
That's really ignorant. When somebody with epilepsy receives a strobing image that can cause real harm. When somebody who's recovering from PTSD receives some gruesome message that makes them relive whatever awful experience they had, that causes real harm too. Online bullying can push people to suicide. It's no joke.
It's absurd to claim that it's impossible to harm people through Twitter (or any other online conduit) when victims claim they are harmed and there is clear evidence of harm.
> Twitter is not useful to journalists.
Journalists say the opposite: they couldn't have gotten their foot in the door without twitter.
> It's not part of our culture.
Okay, this is just too silly. Twitter is everywhere in our culture. In advertisements. On TV. Songs are written about it. Books. All politicians use it. Businesses use it. Twitter is huge for sports. Activists use it to organize. If Twitter isn't part of our culture, then neither are cars or t-shirts.
Milesrout (real name X, location Y) is molesting children and sapping our precious bodily fluids! He has corrupted the police so they won't stop him. Unless someone takes action we're doomed.
I agree with your general arguments, but it is incorrect to say that harassing people on the internet cannot endanger your life.
But there's no doubt that the Internet increases the risk, given the massive scale, relative anonymity, cultural differences, and so on.
Hannu Rajaniemi imagines an intriguing solution in the Quantum Thief. In Martian society, aka the Oubliette, individuals cryptographically regulate who knows, and who can remember, what about each other. So everyone is fundamentally anonymous to everyone else, except for whatever they choose to share with another, or a group.
I can imagine something like Facebook or Twitter doing that, even using GnuPG.
This is a) simple victim blaming and b) impossible to fix in some situations. Illustration of (b) is that the companies of which I'm a director are a matter of public record, and for very little money indeed you can buy online a copy of that record including my home address and telephone number.
It's not "victim blaming". It's just what's so. With the Internet, every obnoxious jerk on the planet can come after you, if you attract enough attention.
I believe it is most certainly victim blaming. The existence of terrible people may well induce one to recommend countermeasures, but the phrasing "stupid enough to put their personal details out there" is first-class (and thoroughly obnoxious) assignment of responsibility for bad behaviour to the victim of that behaviour. It's the same logical construction as blaming rape victims for their clothing.
As for "attract enough attention", the bar for that has been lowered in recent times to "one tweet".
These are not happy times to be a private citizen communicating online in anything but the most closed fora.
This isn't a new issue: http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/anonymity-and-doxing-in-the...
I'm responsible for my own OpSec, but we both know that public registries have their own vulnerabilities. Again, I think I detect a misattribution of responsibility. Nevertheless that was a single example, not the entirety of the means by which personal information can be gleaned by the unscrupulous.
My counter-position is that it is essential for we who have influence over systems design and policy to avoid unintended negative social consequences in the services we build.
It's akin to celebs complaining about gun control, stating they hate guns and would never have one themselves, as they are guarded by several armed body guards.
People want to be anonymous, but don't want just anyone to be able to send them messages. Okay, so who can send you messages? Who can post things you can see? What is your solution to this?
But there are at least two problems. One is subjectivity. As in "terrorist" vs "freedom fighter". The other is that there are lots of assholes out there. Billions of them. It's like spam. You just gotta filter it out.
I think everyone can agree that the most egregious examples of harassment are bad. Sending someone a new picture of gore from a newly created Twitter account every hour for years (or whatever example is trotted out every time this comes up) or scouring DNS records for their address and swatting someone? Yeah obviously that's bad, we all know that's bad. Those are harassment to the level of being criminal offences anyway, there are ways to deal with them.
And I think that everyone agrees that telling someone that their ideas are 'stupid and naive' is perhaps a little hostile, but not to the extent that it needs to be censored.
So what's the middle ground? Are we allowed to swear? Are we going to apply the Americans' ideas of what is offensive to the internet? Because I sure as fuck don't come from America and I sure as fuck don't appreciate being told what is and is not acceptable from a country where it's illegal to say the word 'shit' on TV but it's legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to harass people mourning at the military funerals of gay soldiers. You can sort your own shit out before you start policing the language and behaviour of people in other countries talking to other people from other countries over the international medium that is the internet.
If you want to filter offensive language from your twitter replies, go ahead. Twitter and Facebook are already incredibly filtered thought bubbles, that ship has sailed. It's not going to get any worse if you can automatically filter out everything with language you find 'offensive'.
But this 'let's build a future internet without assholes' stuff is pathetic. What I consider an arsehole, you might consider someone just defending their pronouns or whatever it was that kid stabbed his teacher for the other day.
It takes 5 seconds to make a new account and send the info to the few people you want to bring along.
By the time the troll figures out who you are again, they've usually stopped caring.
Repeat as required.
Secondly, nobody is 'telling them to hide'. You can filter out your twitter replies, you can just not read that material. You can read it and say 'wow there are a few nasty people on the internet'. That's up to you. You can also, yes, remove yourself from toxic, shitty sites like Twitter. But what you shouldn't do is read all the nasty shit and then go 'hey this shit is nasty'. Like, yeah, of course it is. What do you expect? That everyone likes you? Stop hitting yourself.
TotalBiscuit, a minor YouTube celebrity, has said a few times that he's disabled YouTube comments not because he wants to isolate himself from criticism or because he is so offended and thinks those people should be banned from the internet, but because he had a morbid obsession with reading through all the comments even though he knew some things in there would make him feel hurt. He had a problem (he couldn't stop himself from reading things he knew he'd not like) and so he found a solution: disable the comments on YouTube, and only interact with people on a subreddit that he has people he trusts moderate. That's not 'cowering in fear', it's being an adult and solving problems. He's doing basically the same thing celebrities have been doing with fanmail for centuries: getting someone to filter it out for him.
I'm sure many people could get someone to do the same thing with their Twitter replies, and I'm sure many people do. That's your choice, that's their choice. It's not 'abdicating social responsibility', it's not hiding, it's being pragmatic and creating a practical solution to a problem. It doesn't restrict the actions or freedom of others, it doesn't get people arrested or banned from Twitter, it stops you from seeing things you don't like. It's like installing AdBlock instead of legislating that internet ads should not contain pornography because your kids use the computer.
How do you propose to 'try to stop them' anyway? I definitely think that real sources of real personal information, like whois records, need an overhaul. It needs to be possible to register a domain, register a company, etc. in a way that still involves your identity (so that people can dispute copyright, Government can collect taxes, you can be arrested if you're hosting child pornography, etc.) without letting any random person on the internet type in a shell command and getting my home address. And it shouldn't just be 'the Government can access it and nobody else can', that's a shitty solution (although probably better than the current one).
Ignoring that (which is a real problem, unlike 'OMG I got a nasty message on twitter telling me to kill myself, whatever shall I do? Shall I just ignore it, like an adult? No, I'm going to throw a tantrum about it despite being a 26-year-old professional journalist'), what do you propose that 'we' as 'society' should 'do' about the 'problem' of people sending rude messages on Twitter?
All of the best online communities I've been part of have had strong moderation including here on HN. So that's one example of how people can take social responsibility at the level of the platform holder. Twitter is a great example of inadequate time and money spent on that problem.
Where things are complicated right now is in the legal sphere where we have a global entity but many fractured jurisdictions. This prevents the problem being tackled at the right level causing it to persist. This isn't even an issue unique to online harassment.
Mollifying and modifying behaviour as an individual is an admission to being in hostile territory. I'd rather we acted together to bring justice and freedom instead.
2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first place.
>I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to.
99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. Twitter sucks, and has always sucked. It's the epitome of short attention spans and soundbites. Don't use Twitter.
>Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.
Nobody is saying we have to go back to the internet of the late 90s. We just need to understand that there aren't more trolls now than there were then. There are more people in general, and when you are anonymous, they don't have anything to harass you with.