Oh, Twitter, how I love you and hate you. On the one hand, Twitter can be a powerful grassroots organizing tool, a personalized media aggregator, a way to meet and interact with friends and colleagues, and of course one of the world’s most effective distributors of cute cat pics and fart jokes.
On the other, it can empower harassers — from individual stalkers to virtual mobs — and provide a way-too-easy way to send anonymous threats.
And unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t made much of an effort to deal with its abusive users. It can take days, weeks, sometimes months for the site’s harassment cops to do anything about persistent harassers, and all too often the suspended harassers pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go right back to harassing their enemies with brand-new accounts — a blatant violation of Twitter’s rules that seems to be very seldom punished.
But there’s some good news on this front. Twitter is teaming up with Women, Action and the Media (WAM), a small feminist nonprofit, in a pilot program designed to fight this kind of harassment. WAM! has some experience here; this is the group that pressured Facebook into taking hate speech more seriously.
Those subjected to gendered harassment on Twitter can now report the harassment through WAM’s own form, designed to be more flexible and less cumbersome than Twitter’s balky harassment reporting system; WAM staffers will review the complaints and expedite them, enabling Twitter to deal with serious and persistent harassers much more quickly. WAM staffers won’t be able to ban abusers directly, but they can essentially bump cases to the front of the line.
WAM will also be collecting data both on the harassment reports they get on their site and on Twitter’s handling of the cases WAM sends to them.
As the group explains
We’re using this pilot project to learn about what kind of gendered harassment is happening on Twitter, how that harassment intersects with other kinds of harassment (racist, transphobic, etc.), and which kinds of cases Twitter is prepared (and less prepared) to respond to. We’ll then work with Twitter to improve their responses to the harassment of women on their platform.
If you’re wondering why WAM is doing the gruntwork here, instead of Twitter itself, well, the WAMmers are wondering about that, too. While glad that Twitter has agreed to the project, WAM Executive Director Jaclyn Friedman told the Daily Beast that ” Twitter is making a lot of money and they should be putting the resources into this. We should not have to do this project … .”
Hopefully this project will mark the beginning of the end to Twitter’s culture of harassment-without-consequences.
WAM Twitter Harassment Reporting Tool
PewResearch Report on Online Harassment, Oct. 2014
Ooh! Is Twitter about to finally fall to the evil feminist regime? I shall light a scented candle in celebration. Which scent should I burn? Male Tears? Or Essence of Sarkeesian?
And the Men’s Rights Redditors are pissed:
https://np.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2lofyj/twitter_gives_feminist_group_wam_moderation/
Wow, GG’s going to throw a fit about this.
*grabs popcorn*
(Truth: I actually have popcorn right now.)
Huh, MRAs threw a fit first. And ninja’d. Ah well, at least I was partly right. :/
Double misandry points for me! I just asked Mr.Grump to make me some popcorn!
@WWTH – definitely Male Tears. It’s the best scent for misandric celebration.
Oh, MRA’s. “Those horrible feminists won’t let me send women death threats on Twitter, baw, this is a great cosmic injustice.”
Mr. Futrelle(kickass name by the way), I’m unsure about this sentence:
“Twitter is teaming up with Women, Action and the Media (WAM), a small feminist nonprofit that, in a pilot program designed to fight this kind of harassment.”
Could just be my eyes and/or reading comprehension not being up to the job, but that doesn’t feel complete. Is that the case, or am I off-base?
Hope this place runs low on material someday.
Speaking of harassment, Harassment Brigade GamerGate has two new targets. Elizabeth Simims and a young woman who mods a WoW forum, but isn’t actually responsible for the thing they’re mad about because GamerGate are not the brightest folk. https://twitter.com/untimelygamer/status/531605523788222464
@magnesium
Well, she is a woman, after all. And as we know, being a card carrying woman is synonymous with being a part of the Secret Unethical Lizard Journalist Illuminati. We even get fun hat. Err I mean. I haven’t heard a thing about it.
Good news. Anything that reduces harassment is a positive in my mind.
Yes! Set the crying candles burning!
It seems the Political Corrections Bureau has claimed another website…
Bwa-ha-ha! 😉
andiexist – it was pointed out to me yesterday, I forget by whom, that GG has essentially become the gaming branch of the MRA, so you can count yourself as entirely right if you want to.
Ira Shantz-Kreutzkamp
Hi and welcome!
You’re right, it’s “that” throwing the sentence out. It should read “Twitter is teaming up with Women, Action and the Media (WAM), a small feminist nonprofit, in a pilot program designed to fight this kind of harassment.”
@magnesium
censorship on the wow forums sounds AWESOME. In fact I was just talking to my bf last night about how there needs to be way more moderation in-game. He told me that it’s something Blizz really wants to do but there is just SO MUCH especially shut down spam, so they are working on new tools to make it doable.
I reckon if they come down hard on it, handing out bans like candy, they could quickly get it down to manageable levels as the jerks either leave or learn that wow is not 4chan.
@magnesium
Which is kinda silly because all mods go by the written community standards over there, which players agree to sign to whenever posting over there. If these nutters want to go after anyone, they should be going after Blizz themselves for this.
Though it shouldn’t be surprising I guess, as they seem to be targeting anyone female that they disagree with. Of coarse, they wouldn’t dare call it censorship by focused harassment. How convenient.
Trolls call it censorship; I call it idiot management. And it’s about time the tweeter got some.
And, sorry if this is OT on this thread, but here’s a petition to sign to keep Julien “Head. On dick” Blanc out of Canada. He has apparently been here before, and we don’t want him back.
I removed that “that” from my post; I was originally going to add something else there and forgot to remove the “that” when I decided to put the other stuff elsewhere.
“If you’re wondering why WAM is doing the gruntwork here, instead of Twitter itself, well, the WAMmers are wondering about that, too.”
I wasn’t wondering that at all. Harassment is ideal for Twitter’s metrics: they’re engaged users who see a lot of ads. If Twitter starts banning harassers, not only does it affect their bottom line, it also affects their free-speech-at-any-cost-marketplace-of-ideas strategy they’ve had going, despite the idea that the truth wins out over exciting lies being easily disproved by opening literally any news site.
Hi Ira. Others embed the welcome package but I suck. Have a welcome package!
https://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/the-official-man-boobz-complimentary-welcome-package/
Imagine Dickie Dawkins’ ragesplosion if Twitter ever clamped down on misogynistic fuckwads. There would not be enough popcorn in the world for that show.
@magnesium:
They’re going after the mod of a WoW forum because Blizz came out against GamerGate at Blizzcon, and it’s taken them this long to find a way to direct that gamebrorage into an avenue that 1) they can somehow tenuously connect to “censorship” and 2) means they get to blame a woman.
U GUIZE U GUIZE U GUIZE! Maybe the MRA’s were right!
http://www.robot-hugs.com/separation/
Needs more cats.
Huh…my thought was it needed more neutering.