Twitter not free from social responsibility

Will defectors flock back to Twitter, now that the social media platform has announced new measures to clamp down on abusive behaviour and hate speech?

Twitter has long treated its platform as an ungovernable Wild West, a gathering place for those seeking to escape the clutches of over-regulation. Back when it was a startup, founder Biz Stone argued: “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” The hands-off approach put regulating abusive content on par with expecting Bell to referee conversations over its phone lines.

In the course of a decade, users have witnessed the worst of the Wild West: floods of harassment directed at women, particularly those who play video games; shockingly racist trolling; beheadings broadcast by Daesh terrorists. For all its perks — the shared sense of community, the ability to organize in real time — weary users have been jumping off the caravan en masse.

Twitter once famously proclaimed itself “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Finally, it has dropped the pretense social media platforms can be wholly exempt from social responsibility. The longawaited concessions come after a string of high-profile defections — in essence, protesters taking their (social) currency elsewhere.

Thus Twitter has become not just a tool of protest and free speech (including hate speech) but a microcosm for the dynamics of protest and free speech in society writ large.

There was Ghostbusters comedienne Leslie Jones, whose departure followed an onslaught of racist, sexist harassment led by Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos. She returned only after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey intervened and Yiannopoulos was permanently banned.

Just weeks earlier, Jonathan Weisman, a deputy editor with the New York Times, threatened to leave Twitter after anti-Semitic trolls used triple parentheses around his name, or “echoes” (now listed by the Anti-Defamation League as a symbol of hate speech) to identify him as a Jewish target.

Last month, Guardian columnist Lindy West publicly deactivated her account. It wasn’t the white supremacist, anti-feminist trolls themselves, she wrote, but the global repercussions of leaving their hate speech unchecked. “Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalization project,” she wrote scathingly.

Individual acts of protest and plummeting stock prices have led Twitter’s radical experiment in free speech to the same human rights’ protections governing the real world. My right to swing a fist ends at another person’s nose. Emerging tools on Twitter signal a rededication to protection from harassment targeting race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, disability or disease.

The measures announced Tuesday are a long way from unleashing the thought police or broadcast decency standards on the Internet.

Changes include preventing banned users from opening new accounts; creating a “safe search” feature to screen out results from blocked and muted accounts; and collapsing potentially abusive, “low-quality” replies.

Filtered messages will remain accessible to those who would seek them out, but will be hidden from view. Essentially the strategy is to leave trolls shouting in a void and take away their megaphones.

One of the favourite claims of Yiannopoulos and the extreme right is the left wing doesn’t argue issues; it slaps a label on the opposition — racist, misogynist, Islamophobe — and shuts down debate. But free speech is a marketplace of ideas. When bad ideas are drowned out by better voices, that means it’s working.

Twitter’s announcement was on point: “We stand for freedom of expression and people being able to see all sides of any topic. That’s put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices.”