Twitter is failing abysmally on foreign abuse
‘We are committed to creating a culture of trust, safety, and respect,” claims Twitter on its website. Are these rules universal? Apparently so: “We have one set of rules for the hundreds of millions of people who use Twitter and the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent every day.”
Now consider these tweets: “I swear to Allah my blood boils when I see Jews now. I feel like chopping them up, frying them and eating them but I can’t because of a number of reasons,” followed by, “I want to blow myself up along with the whole lot, my friend, but I can’t, so…”
These were both tweeted in Bengali, my native language, by the same account on November 2. Over a month later, the tweets are still up. When they were reported to Twitter, it responded with a generic, “We appreciate your help in improving everyone’s experience on Twitter” message.
I have never found the social media site to be particularly responsive in acting against abusive tweets. It refuses, for example, to delete tweets containing deeply offensive words such as “cooning”, used against ethnic minority Brits because of their political beliefs.
Now, admittedly, if one values freedom of speech then one must accept the freedom of others to be obnoxious and hurtful. It’s a price we pay for living in a free society and I do not doubt for a second that it’s a price worth paying.
But I discovered last month that if a tweet is in a language such as Bengali, even the most disgusting attacks on women and minorities – which easily cross the parameters of freedom of speech into sustained harassment and incitement of sexual violence and racial hatred
– is tolerated by Twitter.
In November, some intimate photos of a Bangladeshi actress were leaked, allegedly when her former boyfriend’s Facebook account was hacked. Since then, the actress, her new husband and even her friends have been bombarded with abusive messages on social media, the likes of which I very much doubt would be tolerated had they been written in English. With apologies, I’d like to share a couple to illustrate the point. “You daughter of a wh*re, how can you still be alive? If I could get my hands on you, I would take you to black men in Nigeria, you’d have liked that, you wh*re.” Another one reads: “She now needs to be raped by dogs.”
These are just two of over 100 similarly threatening, sometimes pornographic, posts tweeted at one woman over the past month, yet this sustained harassment apparently doesn’t break Twitter’s universal rules engendering “trust, safety, and respect”. Why? Because the hatred is expressed in a non-Western language?
In 2017, there were reportedly 80 million internet users in Bangladesh, which is roughly the size of the population of Germany. With user numbers now said to be plateauing in the West, it is the internet population of the developing world that Twitter needs to target for growth and survival. The $25billion company can undoubtedly afford the resources required to provide a basic standard of care to its consumers across the world, whatever language they may speak.
Why is Twitter failing them so abysmally?
FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
There is a pernicious mythology being fed into the public discourse by the indefatigable Remainer rump. It is also being adopted by the irreconcilable hard Left because it serves their purposes for the moment, too. That is, that the Conservative election victory – which was, of course, also another victory for Leave – was actually a defeat for the forces of reason. The real winners were not Boris Johnson’s Tory party and that deplorable army of voters who were adamant in their determination to exit the European Union. And, by deduction, the real losers were not Corbynite Labour and those who longed to remain within the EU. No – this was, in truth, a contest between the educated and the ignorant: between the intelligent, progressive, benevolent middle classes and the benighted denizens of backward hinterlands who emerged from their caves just long enough to wreck the future of Britain’s talented youth.
I’ve lost count of the number of references I have heard on the BBC to the fact that far more university graduates voted for parties that