2017: Finding the internet’s backbone.
This year we resolve to be feverishly focused on activating people around things that matter. More on that later, but today we want to talk about how the internet landscape needs to be different in 2017—starting with social media and how free we let speech be.
Considering Twitter is a digital publisher (and recognized so from Google), they can’t suppress certain political views and need to remain an unbiased platform for open conversation. And they’ve served that purpose well, with ideas and thoughts floating the globe freely for challenge or discussion. So the question remains: when is it appropriate for the service to restrain speech?
With the speed of information, the real-time analysis and insight, the gifs and jokes, the cliques and groups that each support and incite each other on to greatness—Twitter is a marvel of our century and influences our world more so than people realize. Even the stock market has seen the impact of a solitary tweet. But with the free exchange of information and opinion, comes an onslaught of trolls, neo-Nazis and bots whose sole purpose is to argue, kick and scream and micro-manage your thoughts as they arrive. After user @Johnstone411 shows up and threatens a particular user, a culture of fear is created where psychological abuse and rape/death threats are the norm. Users will report the incident, and then nothing happens to combat it.
Twitter is at a pivotal moment in its history, where its greatest asset is also contributing to its decline. Twitter has realized what’s happening and they have started to take action—but is it too late?
Brace Yourself
Recently, Twitter suspended a number of accounts known to be run by white supremacists, like Richard Spencer and others associated with the ‘alt-right.’ This ban comes after Milo Yiannopoulos was kicked off the platform after encouraging his followers to tweet comments of racist, misogynistic and cruel remarks at Leslie Jones. At the time, Twitter took the then-unusual step of permanently banning Yiannopoulos, who worked for Breitbart. (And he STILL got a book deal, for some reason.)
Back to Richard Spencer: this is not the kind of guy that you’d like to invite over for brunch. He’s been bannedfrom visiting the United Kingdom for fears of provoking ethnic violence AND he’s been banned in Hungary for breaching “the human dignity of others.” And he wasn’t the only white supremacist who was banned from Twitter. The Virginia-based National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal (which Spencer runs), Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers also had their accounts suspended.
They cried, of course, stating that they have freedom of speech. And Spencer (guess what?) after less than a month banned, has had his account reinstated. Sounds about right.
So back to the first question—when is it appropriate for Twitter to restrain speech?
Here’s a reminder: Twitter’s rules don’t allow direct or indirect threats of violence and neither does it allow accounts that are “inciting others” toward harassment. This is the company’s “hateful conduct” rule:
“You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.”
It doesn’t matter if any of these (very racist) people were actually tweeting hardline threats out to their followers. What does matter is the fact that the beliefs, the ideology and the ongoing thoughts of a white supremacist are intrinsically hateful to thousands of people around the world. The way they think, the way that they live their lives and spur other people is DIRECTLY threatening to other people on the basis of race and ethnicity, and it’s showing up on Twitter in droves.
Twitter’s Trying
Recently, Twitter introduced their new, waaaaay-long-overdue anti-harassment tools to combat the growing incidents of hate speech flooding Twitter feeds all over the world.
Twitter tweaked its mute feature, allowing users to filter specific phrases, keywords, hashtags and entire conversation threads. Now, users can stop receiving notifications from any specific Twitter thread without manually removing the thread or blocking any users. Nevertheless, you’ll only be able to mute the specific conversations that relate to a tweet you’re included in, as in: where your handle is mentioned online.
Now, let’s be honest for a second. This doesn’t GET RID of the harassment. It merely slaps a bandaid on it, removes it from sight with an obnoxious “You good?” stamp. We’re not knocking it because the less audience you have, the less reason there is for bullying when it comes down to it. We also know that the internet is creative, and where there’s a will, there’s a way. In the interest of making Twitter a safer and more inclusiveplace, this is a largely cosmetic fix.
We’re proud of the strides Twitter is taking to retrain their staff to better deal with abusive incidents, and now even users can take matters into their own hands with their new reporting tools.
“And finally, on enforcement, we’ve retrained all of our support teams on our policies, including special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct, and implemented an ongoing refresher program. We’ve also improved our internal tools and systems in order to deal more effectively with this conduct when it’s reported to us. Our goal is a faster and more transparent process.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spent six hours asking for advice and input from his followers on Twitter last week, where the issue of abuse came up multiple times. Dorsey assured his followers that it’s being explored thoroughly.
Although Twitter has been notorious for ignoring the pleas of users facing abuse, these new tools can help users try and shield themselves—and knowing that there’s a team of employees working to make the platform safer is a triumphant moment for hundreds of people who are consistently trying to make the platform better for everyone. In the meantime, Twitter should step up their game and start suspending hate accounts. Your move, Jack.