If I get provably burgled 50 times a month, I wouldn't expect the local police to stop taking me seriously. If anything, I'd expect them to streamline the process of investigating and prosecuting the crimes.
If she was crying wolf multiple times, that's one thing - but the threats against her are undeniable.
Re:Twitter- optimised for abuse
by tlrobinson on Monday May 12, 2014 @11:41AM
(#7733374)
"the threats against her are undeniable"
But are they credible? Someone could (and probably has) write a bot to make idle threats against dozens of feminists on a daily basis. Should the police investigate every one of them?
I'd actually argue that this is irrelevant.
The key here is that they're not threatening to commit a crime - the threat itself is the crime.
If a man on the internet says that he's gonna come to your house tonight and rape you, and then it turns out that he lives in Britain and you live in Canada, does that make getting the rape threat any less terrifying?
absolutely
If they can put someone on the case at all, they can then select out cases where one user makes multiple threats, for example, or some similar criterion, and where the likely perpetrators can be identified. Law enforcement never tries to catch 100% of criminals, they just need to pursue the worst in each category and publicize convictions to exert a deterrent effect.
Re:Twitter- optimised for abuse
by digitalengineer on Monday May 12, 2014 @09:20AM
(#7732497)
>by anonymous people on the internet... Made me smile.
If she called law enforcement every time she got a threatening tweet or email, there's a good chance the cops would stop taking her seriously. They only have so many man-hours to dedicate to investigations like this, and each one takes a while. In the mean time, she's still subject to more abuse which strains her mental health even more. I wouldn't discount the possibility of serious self-harm in cases like these.
While it would be nice if there were a streamlined process to report threats like these to the police, and a streamlined process for the police to investigate them, there's a more important action here: protecting innocent people. Twitter has the means and ability, and in my view should be a moral imperative, to keep people from harm if they can help it. Twitter can do more to protect people from hate speech and abusive language, which would greatly reduce the suffering of many people.
We don't have to hold Twitter responsible for how their users treat others, but we do have to hold Twitter responsible for how they treat their users - which is to enable their abuse by other users. Can you imagine if ten Starbucks customers were verbally abusing one woman and the Starbucks employees did nothing? At the very least, Starbucks should be expected to call the police on behalf of the victim, just as Twitter should do. Sadly, we don't hold social media companies to the same moral standards as a coffee shop.