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Twitter- optimised for abuse

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Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#41

Post by nemof »

chroma wrote: post #8

Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with. Also, it seems unusual to hold Twitter responsible for their users' speech. UI tweaks may reduce the amount of hatred seen, but they are not going to solve this problem. Lastly, I spent some time perusing other posts on this blog. They are not furthering any discussion, to put it…

to be clear, CCP (caroline criado-perez) has been reporting these threats to the police for months and months.

Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others?

If you haven't heard of CCP before, you should take some time to read about the amount of abuse she's faced for campaigning on important women's issues over the last year or so. She's not just some random blogger, she's an important figure in the UK due to the campaigning she's done and the abuse she's received through twitter. This belongs on Hacker News exactly because it's about the intersection of Tech and human beings, and the lack of foresight which has allowed some of this abuse to occur.

Startups should be paying attention to stories like this when they look to design services that are safe spaces that everyone can use without being abused or terrorised by other users.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#42

Post by drb311 »

brohee wrote: post #10
jval wrote: post #7

Would it be that difficult to add in an 'Abusive Off' feature? You can just flick it off and any tweets containing blacklisted words vanish. Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people who are obscenity averse might like to enable it too. Heck, I might even enable it myself when reading the activity on some hashtags.

Keyword matching doesn't work, never did without way too much collateral damage. Being able to filter "I will rape you tonight" based on the word "rape" is of no use at all to someone that actually wants to discuss the subject of rape, but doesn't want to be threatened by it. This is a social problem without a technical solution, even not permitting blocked people of following and retweet like she'd like to is of lit…

Is identifying a threatening or abusive tweet any harder than identifying a spam email? Modern filters can get rid of most spam mails pretty well, and don't delete much that the receiver will miss.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#43

Post by abrahamsen »

nemof wrote: post #41
chroma wrote: post #8

Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with. Also, it seems unusual to hold Twitter responsible for their users' speech. UI tweaks may reduce the amount of hatred seen, but they are not going to solve this problem. Lastly, I spent some time perusing other posts on this blog. They are not furthering any discussion, to put it…

to be clear, CCP (caroline criado-perez) has been reporting these threats to the police for months and months. Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others? If you haven't heard of CCP before, you should take some time to read about the amount of abuse she's faced for campaigning on important women's issues over the last year or so. She's not just some random blogger, she'…

> Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others?

Because I like Hacker News. If Hacker News was responsible for the posts of its users, it would not exist. The value it provides for Y Combinator would not match the risk.

Also, email as we know it would not exist. The price of stamps would skyrocket as the postal service would need to hire people to read all letters in case they contained death threats. If any of the web services deserves common carrier protection, it would be twitter.

Whenever something bad happens (like here), there will always be demands for more surveillance. More central control. These demands are just, the victims are real. And the solution exist. We could have a world with only a few highly curated and monitored for pay communication channels, where death threads plus anything else our governments want to keep out would be kept out.

Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks unable to emphasize with the victims. Or can easily be portrayed that way.

Righteous indignation comes with a price.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#44

Post by tlrobinson »

timje1 wrote: post #25
peterwwillis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you expect law enforcement to do about hundreds (if not thousands) of threats of violence by anonymous people on the internet? An investigation into the IP address of each tweet? 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…

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.

"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?

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#45

Post by brohee »

drb311 wrote: post #42
brohee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyword matching doesn't work, never did without way too much collateral damage. Being able to filter "I will rape you tonight" based on the word "rape" is of no use at all to someone that actually wants to discuss the subject of rape, but doesn't want to be threatened by it. This is a social problem without a technical solution, even not permitting blocked people of following and retweet like she'd like to is of lit…

Is identifying a threatening or abusive tweet any harder than identifying a spam email? Modern filters can get rid of most spam mails pretty well, and don't delete much that the receiver will miss.

If your legitimate email dealt a lot with replica watches and erectile dysfunction medication, your spam would happen to look a lot more like what you need to see, and I'm pretty sure you'd be unhappy with the current antispam technology...

The issue here is that the offensive text is so close to the desired text, to the point that quoting threatening material makes it non threatening. The tweet 'He said "You will be raped tonight"' may be as non threatening as it gets, while "You will be raped tonight" should land its author before a judge.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's IMHO very hard.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#46

Post by nemof »

abrahamsen wrote: post #43
nemof wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be clear, CCP (caroline criado-perez) has been reporting these threats to the police for months and months. Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others? If you haven't heard of CCP before, you should take some time to read about the amount of abuse she's faced for campaigning on important women's issues over the last year or so. She's not just some random blogger, she'…

> Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others? Because I like Hacker News. If Hacker News was responsible for the posts of its users, it would not exist. The value it provides for Y Combinator would not match the risk. Also, email as we know it would not exist. The price of stamps would skyrocket as the postal service would need to hire people to read all letters in case…

let's get something clear here, just because this kind of argument pops up all the time. Firstly compounding several different disparate services which differ vastly is completely silly.

1, hacker news IS responsible for the content that appears on it. If someone posts something that hacker news is legally obliged to remove, they will (not to mention we know that hacker news engages in hellbans etc).

2, email is a commonly used set of protocols, not a company product. You could think of the postal service in a similar way. They act more like dumb pipes, but email hosts differ from real world post in that they have an added responsibility to make sure they aren't used as spam relays. Twitter/hacker news etc are not dumb pipes.

3, in this paranoid tech world, women asking to be safe on social networks and the internet, and asking to be able to report abuse is equated to state spying and invasive surveillance, what the fuck. What the actual fuck. People just want to be able safely use the internet without having themselves threatened.

> Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks

If people are easily portrayed as having their foot in their mouth, there might be a reason for this. When you start conflating women's safety with state surveillance your foot is safely planted deep in your mouth.

Perhaps, and I'm going out on a limb here, just perhaps, part of protecting against the tyranny of surveillance and invasive state practices might be making the internet a strong safe place for anyone, so governments don't step in and do it for us in a way we really dislike.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#47

Post by iLoch »

jellicle wrote: post #37
gokhan wrote: post #14

1 hour, 28 points and it's on the second page. Is this story flagged or penalized? If so, such a shame.

All stories having anything to do with women on the internet get heavily flagged by HN users and disappear quickly.

Oh please, every week there's at least one post that reaches the top 10 about women in tech. HN is filled with plenty of bright individuals who are quite capable of perpetuating equality.

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#48

Post by clearly »

tlrobinson wrote: post #44
timje1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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?

absolutely

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#49

Post by timje1 »

tlrobinson wrote: post #44
timje1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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?

Re: Twitter- optimised for abuse

#50

Post by Rudism »

Is there a good reason why CCP continues to even use Twitter in the face of all this abuse? I'm not suggesting that the assaulters are in any way justified in what they're doing, but leaving Twitter and finding different ways to communicate with people seems like an obvious solution to the problem.

Maybe it's harder for me to grok as someone who never really got into Twitter in the first place.

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