Twitter takes clear action on abuse
Finally. After years of appearing to tolerate a level of abusive and bullying tweets in the name of free speech, Twitter has stepped up and taken clear action.
The internet firm’s decision to permanently ban conservative journalist and professional agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, who has more than 300,000 Twitter followers, was a long time coming.
It wasn’t just because he participated in the online trolling of “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones, who said goodbye to Twitter after she was besieged by racist and sexist tweets. Yiannopoulos, who had been suspended in the past, was already on a Twitter short leash.
This week, Yiannopoulos shot back, accusing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey of treating Twitter as his “own private fiefdom.”
Good for Dorsey. Someone had to take ownership of Twitter’s climate. Who better than the CEO of the company? And if @Nero (Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle) feels like he has been wrongly punished since he didn’t say some of the worst stuff, so be it. (He’s talking to his fans over on his Facebook account now.)
Abuse on Twitter has been a long-running issue, rising to the surface every few months when a celebrity cries “Enough!” and announces he or she is exiting the microblogging site. Users yell at @ support, Twitter’s support team handle, to do something.
Women on Twitter in particular are aware that saying anything controversial can open you up to not just a few mean comments but a campaign of vitriol, such as doxxing (when personal information is displayed on Twitter), impersonation and “swatting” (when someone calls 911 as a prank and sends law enforcement to a person’s address).
To date, there haven’t been any good numbers on how many people are affected by online abuse. A 2014 Pew Research Center study found 40 percent of people online have been harassed at one time or another. A Women’s Health magazine survey found that 55 percent of its readers had experienced some online abuse.
Many internet companies have struggled with speech and abuse, but Twitter has been called out more often than its peers and for good reason. It has to get this right. Unlike Facebook, the company is struggling with both gaining users and making money.
“Twitter has been notoriously horrible at policing their terms of service,” said Parry Aftab, an internet privacy and security lawyer and expert in cybercrime. When people complain, “(Twitter) will tell you it’s not a violation, if you are lucky to get a response at all.”
For Twitter in particular, online abuse “is a tricky issue,” said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.” “There is a careful balance to be struck. They understand themselves as a free speech platform. It’s been hard for them because they care about the important value of their platform as a speech generator.”
For way too long, Twitter executives have said they have to do better. Former CEO Dick Costolo said it. Now Dorsey is saying it, as he did this week during an earnings call.
“Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment if they speak up,” Dorsey said. “No one deserves to be the target of abuse online and it has no place on Twitter.”
Throwing people off the site isn’t typically good business, but Twitter, with 313 million active users, is starting to understand that retaining customers who use Twitter as a way to broadcast hate and instigate an army of abusers is even worse business.
Twitter has done much in the past 18 months to ramp up its focus on the issue. Now it’s time to do even more to show it is serious about elevating civil discourse, as Dorsey said.
Even though it might scare people away, Twitter should regularly publish data about harassment, including how many accounts it has suspended or blocked. The data should be broken down by gender, race and ethnicity and include information about the company’s response time, since the firm’s executives often say they aren’t moving fast enough.
The company does occasionally work with partner groups to study the issue, but as far as I can tell no other peer company has routinely offered data on the scope of the problem. Twitter can break new ground.
In its terms of service, Twitter should give concrete but anonymous examples of speech that crosses the line. It should be explicit about why it bans anyone, particularly public figures.
Finally, Twitter execs should blog even more about what they are doing — even about attempts that don’t work— to address the problem.
“It would help if there were more discussions with the public,” said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University. “We often feel nothing is happening.”
Twitter should be applauded for taking a stand. I’m OK if Dorsey runs Twitter as a fiefdom. It’s not a democracy. But Twitter can build on the goodwill it has received for booting @Nero if it steps up and continues to take a stand against online abuse.