Addressing Internet Harassment

This hit my facebook feed:

…But some of your users have taken that freedom as a license to victimize others. This is not fine.

The article’s overall point is good — Platforms need to develop better tools to deal with spammers and harassment. I’ve mentioned the same:

Twitter is a tech company and any solution should be tech oriented, not philosophically oriented. Yes, people should treat one another better. Go try to fix human evils and tell me how successful you are.

For those of us who deal with reality, the solution is to allow users to interact with whom they wish to interact.

My theory of why Twitter hasn’t come up with this type of a tool yet is they don’t want users being too powerful in being able to block Ads. If their tool is powerful enough to block users the way I have described, it might be used to lower exposure to tweets they want put before users. It’s similar to how Facebook desperately wants to be able to put content in front of you based on your data for ad revenue, but Twitter’s platform is simply much more prone to abuse.

But this story parrots falsehoods about the Leslie Jones saga, among other things. She wasn’t driven off twitter — she’s there to this day. She also made the whole charade as bad as it turned out by antagonizing and attacking trolls, in kind, who she could have easily blocked or muted. This attracted more trolls. She kept antagonizing them for a while, even RTing them and asking her followers to attack them (literally the definition of inciting harassment), then, hours later, had her movie insulted by Milo, someone with a large twitter footprint, briefly stopped tweeting when the feeding frenzy became too intense, and returned some days later (after Milo had been banned for being mean and supposedly starting an incident he barely participated in, at the end).

In other words, she tried to fight abuse with more abuse, failed, and media uses that as the cornerstone example of “oh boo hoo abuse”. None of what she received was justified. But her response was absolutely the opposite of how people are currently able to deal with trolls — It takes a few clicks to block one user (but there are plenty of possibilities of making that easier or more effective).

So yes, harassment on the internet is an issue. But the solution is technological. And it certainly shouldn’t involve companies policing speech on platforms that should be individually determined.