Twitter’s a Tool and a Weapon. That’s Why Social Media Platforms Need Community Standards.
I get called a lot of nasty things on Twitter. Often, it’s garden-variety profanity. Sometimes it’s an epithet that mistakes my sexual orientation or my intellectual capacity. On occasion, people just call me fat. Given the extra padding, I can take a fair amount of abuse without thinking much about it.
On Wednesday morning, though, someone with the handle @WYVeteran told me, in a most unsavory way, that I was wrong to call Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate for Mike Pence:
It was part of a longer Twitter tirade from this person, who brags about being blocked by Chuck Todd, Lizz Winstead, Meghan McCain, Deion Sanders and others. I can’t recall anyone ever accusing me of harboring sympathy for Hitler before, and let me be clear that I do not. As a Jew, I found the charge particularly repugnant.
But like Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, who wrote earlier this week about Twitter abuse, I’ve been spared the horrific anti-Semitism, rape wishes and vile offers of consensual sexual congress that my peers endure on social media.
In May, Laurie Segall, a tech reporter for CNN, wrote on Medium about the twisted Tweets she’s received, including this one:
“Laurie, I’ve just watched you interview Evan Williams of Twitter. You are a FINE looking bitch. I want to eat you, babe. Call me”
Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor for the New York Times, abandoned Twitter temporarily after being targeted by anti-Semitic Donald Trump supporters. He wrote about his experience shortly after Segall took to Medium.
In the tech world, Renee DiResta has written about waves of horrific abuse directed at her, including “creeps” Tweeting a picture of her infant and obtaining her personal information — from Twitter. Women seem to get it much worse than men. Here’s a Hillary Clinton fan who went after the Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey because she amplified something I wrote:
For many years and with good reason, most of us have celebrated the liberties of the Internet. But the open-ness of new media platforms has come at a cost: countless individual targets of abuse and the shredding of our social fabric.
Twitter is no longer just a tool; it is also a weapon.
That’s scary for some users, including many of the elites whose 140-character bursts of news, insight and analysis helped drive Twitter’s growth and prowess.
This conundrum becomes more acute the bigger a social platform becomes. Twitter is the focus of much of the antipathy toward social media precisely because it has been so successful at creating large and dynamic networks. But Twitter also has had difficulty maintaining a sense of actual community at scale.
At times, the company has suspended users’ accounts for violations of the platform’s code of conduct and even banned some offenders. The problem for many rule-abiding users is that the code doesn’t really offer much protection.
There are basically seven deadly sins that can get you thrown off Twitter: Threatening to commit acts of violence or terrorism against others; threatening violence against yourself; threatening to commit acts of violence against others based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation; inciting mob harassment of other users; evading the suspension of an account by creating another one; and posting other people’s private information on the platform. For the most part, what Twitter is saying is that you can’t use its service to break the law.
In his column, Rutenberg quoted well-respected Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, a target of anti-Semitic abuse, on the dilemma many journalists face in determining how to handle abuse.
“At a certain point I’d rather take myself off the platform where the speech has become so offensive than advocate for the suppression of that speech,” Goldberg said.
Twitter is wrestling with these questions. Yesterday, it suspended Ricky Vaughn, an anonymous nativist (Vaughn is the name of a character in the “Major League” movies) and leader of Trump backers online. It’s not clear which of Vaughn’s Tweets got him suspended, but Twitter’s decision sparked a hashtag — #FreeRicky—that was at the top of the trend list on the platform last night.
It’s hard to start imposing new rules on a community without risking a major backlash, especially when the company in question has staked its brand on the idea that it — rather than, say, the Constitution — is the guardian of free speech.
That’s one of the many reasons I feel so fortunate to be the head of community and content at Sidewire, a year-old public chat platform focused on harnessing the intellectual firepower, knowledge and humor of experts on politics, policy and technology.
After I first posted this piece on Thursday morning, Laurie Segall, Jonathan Weisman and I had a thoughtful, informal chat on Sidewire about the challenges of online abuse and what tech companies could or should do to limit it.
Our community sets its own norms of behavior, promoting civilized and sophisticated discourse over the cacophony of more anarchic platforms. In part, that’s because we have moved existing, real-world communities of experts online. Our users have something to gain by interacting in positive ways and something to lose if they are ostracized by their friends and peers. There’s no incentive to subtract from the community. In essence, our model short sells anger and goes long on the desire for productively provocative discussion.
Our “Newsmakers” are experts in their fields who chat with each other both for their own benefit and for that of the general reading public. Anyone can view the text chats — and we encourage everyone to check them out at sidewire.com or on our app — but only the newsmakers can post. The newsmakers are invited to the platform by their peers, and, while we reserve the right to revoke credentials, we haven’t had to confront that situation yet.
We will soon begin experimenting with ways to join our reader and newsmaker communities, in large part because we believe our existing users have now established standards of excellence that don’t exist anywhere else on the Internet.
We’re all signal, no noise — and no abuse. Our community has managed to maintain that through discussions of divisive issues, not least of which are a presidential election, the response to terrorism at home and abroad, and police-involved shootings.
Our Newsmakers represent the poles of the political right and left, but they are bonded by their respect for each other’s ideas and their optimism about the benefits of high-level public chats. Many of them knew each other before Sidewire launched a year ago, but many more are meeting for the first time on our platform.
It would be unfair to compare our community with those of the much larger social network platforms in part because scale is a major factor in poor behavior online, and there may come a time when we have to put new rules in place. Surely, we would struggle with that, too.
But we believe building a community around the quality of its users and their content is a much better way to avoid the harassment, abuse and trolling that turns off many social media users. Our community demands and observes behavior that promotes enlightenment and mutual respect. We don’t have a code of conduct because our community already has one.
