Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has frankly admitted that his company has done a terrible job of dealing with trolls and abusers. And he’s promised to do better, declaring that Twitter would “start kicking these people off right and left.”
In a remarkably candid note to concerned staffers, obtained and posted online by The Verge, Costolo was blunt about Twitter’s failure to protect its users from harassers:
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
He’s got that right.
Costolo went on to accept personal responsibility for this failure:
I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.
And he pledged to go after the harassers much more aggressively:
We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.
In a followup note, he again took personal responsibility for the problem, and assured staffers that his promise to boot the trolls and harassers would be more than an empty declaration:
[T]he truth that everybody in the world knows is that we have not effectively dealt with this problem even remotely to the degree we should have by now, and that’s on me and nobody else. So now we’re going to fix it, and I’m going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.
Let’s hope he lives up to this promise. Facebook made a similar promise to crack down on hate speech in 2013, but hateful sexist and racist material is still posted regularly on that platform with no repercussions.
And everyone who has tried to report harassment and abuse on Twitter knows how hard it is to get Twitter to taken any actions against harassers. And even when harassers’ accounts are banned, the bans are often temporary, while those who are permabanned can simply start up new accounts to continue their harassment and abuse.
Costolo’s notes came in response to a discussion on an internal message board about feminist writer Lindy West’s recent Guardian article and This American Life segment dealing with the harassment she’s gotten on Twitter. Costolo made clear that he’s acutely aware of the media coverage and criticism of Twitter’s lackluster attempts to deal with the trolls who so often turn Twitter into a kind of “hate amplifier.”
In other words, Twitter is responding to this problem because the targets of Twitter harassment and abuse are talking about their experiences publicly.
The “don’t feed the trolls” approach that is so often advocated by those who try to minimize and/or excuse the harassment does not in fact work; indeed, “not feeding” trolls encourages them, by making clear they will face no repercussions for their abusive behavior.
“Don’t feed the trolls” FEEDS THE TROLLS.
Everyone who is legitimately concerned about trolling online owes a debt of gratitude to Lindy West and the numerous other targets of harassment — most of them women — who have spoken up publicly about their experiences, putting themselves at risk of even more harassment.
And we owe a debt of gratitude as well to Jaclyn Friedman and the others at Women, Action and the Media who also put themselves at risk when they stepped forward to assist Twitter in dealing with its harassment problem.
Let’s keep the pressure on Twitter and on other online platforms that have been used as hate amplifiers. That’s the only way to ensure that the people running these platforms actually do anything to curb the hate.
Not a lot. But, for everyone you ban, a certain number will give up. Being banned is a pain if you are an established user, and even if you aren’t, creating a new account involves a small amount of work that not everyone will want to do just to troll someone. And if they create a new account, and tweet harassment, then it is even easier for a moderator to declare them to be illegitimate. “OK, this user has 3 tweets and every one of them is telling Anita Sarkeesian to kill herself. Obviously, banhammer.”
Persistent trolls will find a way to troll. But most trolls are bandwagon trolls, harassing people because their friends are doing it and they think it is funny or harmless.Make it annoying for the bandwagon trolls to participate and a lot will stop. And banning the persistent trolls will at least temporarily break up the community they’ve built around themselves on twitter.
And of course…of course!…the GamerGators and the MRA’s and the other internet abusers will blame the SJW’s.
You use the thing to hurt people, someone takes the thing away from you. Most of us learn that when we’re three.
I always feel a little surge of frustration when I see the old “feed the trolls” advice, because it has been twisted to mean something totally different from the way the Internet community on USENET originally intended/used it, much as the word “troll” has been warped.
Originally, a “troll” was a person that disrupted discussion groups by causing arguments involving as many people as possible, often by “innocently” questioning the group’s beliefs or posting strange questions (one possible-troll recently used “which fonts are most commonly installed on a computer?”). The goal was in part to remain undetected for as long as possible, so they valued subtlety/finesse and had nothing but scorn for the crude ‘newbie troll’ method of personal attacks.
So ‘trolls’ at the time were mischievous, disruptive people that really did want attention. When the person went too far over the line, the unwritten agreement was that all group members would killfile the individual and make a one-sentence post indicating that, like “have fun in the bozo bin, troll!” If a newcomer or anyone else replied to the troll’s posts, that was when “don’t feed the troll” was used — as a reminder for everyone in the community to act together against the troll, not to push the lone victim into doing so.
As for the ‘how can we stop harassment when banning/permabanning folks just makes them create new accounts and keep on harassing?’ problem, that could be potentially fixed by having a setting that you can switch on to disallow any accounts newer than, say, 2 weeks old, from being able to address you. Trolls get banned, if they want new accounts to harass with, they’ll have to wait weeks, and then they’ll get banned again if/when they start it up, and have to wait again (in an ideal situation, anyway).
It won’t solve the problem of actual threats not being addressed by the authorities, but it will make abusers lives harder.
@xyzzy Yeah, the old-skool trolls would set out to provoke people by deliberately saying something contrary, then sit back and chortle when others reacted by losing their shit. The “trolls” sending Sarkeesian, Wu, Quinn and others horrible death threats aren’t sitting back and chortling, they’re foaming at the mouth and beating themselves over the head with their own fists.
Excellent post, David.
Meh. I keep hearing nostalgic stories about “mischievous” old school trolls. As far as I’m concerned, “mischievous” means they’re an asshole who thinks they’re funny at best, a bully who expects their victim to laugh along at worst. They may not be terrorists, but that doesn’t make them decent human beings.
Twitter needs to be fundamentally restructured in ways like this if it’s to be improved. The totally flat interface with its complete lack of screening is one of its big strengths, but also one of its big weaknesses. These kinds of screening tools need to be available.
Screening by number of followers is also good, particularly if paired with an automatic check for fake followers.
@seraph4377:
Agreed, it doesn’t make them decent human beings. As I noted above, they were basically practical jokesters, along the lines of the person who puts ink on the eye-socket end of a pair of binoculars and then hands them to someone with a ‘take a look at that!’ just to watch the person get rings around their eyes.
Still a far cry from the death and rape threats flying around these days, though.
Given the sheer volume of traffic on these sites, I don’t know that Twitter or Facebook will ever be able to respond proactively. The best they can do is respond quickly which I understand has been lacking
It might also have the effect of protecting some trolls from themselves. There have been some awful cases in the UK of trolls acting badly with terrible consequences – for them. A couple of not terribly bright young trolls sent death and bomb threats to some feminists. It started as low level threats, but as they got more attention they escalated the threats. They were sad and lonely people who didn’t seem to be thinking about the women receiving the threats.
But they went to jail for it.
Then there was the middle aged woman who tweeted nasty stuff at the McCanns (who lost their daughter in Portugal) and when she was outed by the media, she killed herself.
The horrible “don’t feed the trolls” refrain also creates an environment that encourages harassment. It puts all the blame on the victim by making any response the wrong action to take. They don’t address what the harasser is doing, just what the one being victimized is. This creates a sense that what the harasser is doing is neutral. The person harassing surely believes they aren’t doing anything wrong… The stupid person they’re “trolling” can make it all go away by shutting up and getting off the internet. (And of course silence is the true goal of modern “trolling”)
The environment becomes one where the harassers are the default population. Everybody else just has to navigate the troll’s home, and if they get loud and obnoxious… “You shouldn’t feed them…”
If people would put as much energy in making it clear trolling and harassment is wrong as they do telling people not to feed them… the environment would shift to one that doesn’t tolerate it.
It pisses me off so much! So often wrong doing is treated as a force of nature. All these people doing this shit are human beings.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but part of the problem is that lots of older people – particularly in law enforcement – still think the internet is this nebulous thing that doesn’t really matter in the real world. They don’t realise that “Just shut it off” is actually the equivalent of “well just don’t go outside then”.
I think it’s possible to respond proactively. There are various things you can do to make trolling less appealing, from reducing anonymity to adding greater user control over who sees what. It’s never going to eliminate harassment, but it could make Twitter a less attractive platform for it.
Cyberwulf,
True. The people I’m charge have no idea what 4 chan and reddit are and they don’t know how twitter works. It’s not in the comfort zone so they brush it off. Maybe twitter could donate some funds to train police departments on this issue. Police departments really need to put some effort into hiring people with expertise in social media and computers.
There’s a pretty big difference between posting a deliberately inflammatory “Apple vs. Microsoft” article to annoy people and direct, targeted attacks against a specific person. Calling the attacks against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian “trolling” minimizes the seriousness of what’s going on.
Think of it this way: If people are trying to get an emotional reaction and cause trouble in general, ignoring them will probably make them go away. If they’re targeting a specific person, ignoring them sends the message that you’re tolerating their behavior.
@Catalpa
I always wondered why they can’t permaban by mac address. The mac address is unique to your inet card and there before they can’t rejoin the site unless they change the gadget they are using for connect to the site.
I know is kind of extreme, but if the same mac address get banned for the 3rd time with different users, I think is ok.
In other things, we should insist to twitter to store all the tweets of the harraser account in a special site in which only twitter and authorities can access, or, in last instance, be able to release the information to the authorities by request of them. Because close an account for harassment and actually delete the information are two different things.
WWTH: That remind me of that Geico commercial where the old lady is talking about posting things to her wall and the camera pulls back to show that she’s posted photos to the wall of her living room.
It’s possible to spoof a MAC address, which is relatively easy on a software level. You can also use a hacked shell account to post or install an inet card or driver that creates a random MAC address every time it establishes a connection.
Hahaha, I say that all the damn time:
“That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!”
It has always seemed to me that both schools and parents need to be very alert to the first signs of bullying. It is a behavior that becomes a habit, and bullies eventually find themselves generally detested and unable to fit in, so letting a child be a bully is not doing them the slightest favor. It has to be caught in the bud — much easier to fix it at the beginning that dealing with it once it has become ingrained in a child who will probably resort to the same anti-social behavior as an adult.
Another issue: People are correct that the First Amendment does not apply to private businesses; Twitter can ban people for just about anything they want. But if you take things to the police, they ARE the government, and the First Amendment does apply to them.
Except we’re not talking about arresting people just for being misogynistic piles of elephant shit, we’re talking about arresting people for rape, death, mass shooting and bomb threats. Abuse, harassment and threats are not political or religious opinions and the First Amendment will never apply.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png
M, you are correct insofar as that if you could get a conviction in an egregious case, the courts might well uphold it. However the authorities seem to get very timid when they think that the thugs on the right wing might start calling THEM jack-booted thugs (as the style is these days), so the problem is getting such a case through the system and into the courts.
Being nervous about trampling on people’s free speech rights is a good thing, but some verbal assaults do more damage — sometimes far more — than many physical assaults, and the law needs to recognize that and do its job.