Twitter, the best intentions, and the road to hell…
Surely the most interesting read today for those interested in social networks and how they work is a long article in Fast Company entitled “Did we create this monster?’ How Twitter turned toxic”, which masterfully narrates a process I have experienced and that the company, with which I have enjoyed a relatively privileged level of contact, has never seriously addressed: how a platform created to allow people to share short messages became a poisonous environment, in which trying to maintain its value proposition for users has turned into an obstacle course.
Talking to the founders of Twitter in the early days, I was struck by their commitment to protecting freedom of expression. But the outcome of this initially attractive belief has turned out to simply be irresponsible, similar to parents trying to educate their child without any kind of boundaries.
The following paragraph is part of a sequence of messages with one of the founders of Twitter as early as 2008, when I found myself the victim of bullying and harassment on the social network:
It is sad to see you consider the account a parody. By doing so, I truly believe you are stretching the concept of parody to its very limits (…) It is exactly the same thing as being harassed by a bully in school: these people writing complaints are the boys standing around the bully watching him harassing the other guy, laughing their ass off and doing nothing. It is cruel and it is wrong. It is not a parody, its plain cruelty, and is something that everyone, including my daughter and my family, can see. Quite frankly, if I had invented something like Twitter and saw it used to cause so much harm, pain and sorrow, I wouldn’t feel at ease with myself. When I originally asked you for advice, I was expecting Twittter to react by deleting the account. Doing what you did obviously made things much worse: you turned the bully into some sort of hero. I respectfully ask you again to reconsider the deletion of the page and define clearly the concept of parody: any lawyer would tell you the parody ends when it meets permanent, long lasting harassment, and this is exactly what this guy is doing to me.
That episode, when Twitter’s popularity was going through the roof, was deeply painful: I understand that not everybody may like me, but for a group of individuals to go to the trouble of organizing themselves to insult me, while others, including people I thought were friends to stand on the sidelines and laugh, was disturbing and had nothing to do with freedom of expression. I learned a lot, and it influenced my online activities.
Six years on, things remain pretty much unchanged. The account that was harassing me has removed its contents, but not because Twitter acted to stop the harassment: if the content was uploaded again tomorrow, I’m sure Twitter would celebrate it again as yet another act of freedom of expression. I too respect the right to say what one wants, but actually, there are limits, and there should be, otherwise we end up in the snake pit that Twitter has become. Today’s post is very much a continuation of yesterday’s: in the same way that we don’t give in to our children’s every whim, for their own good, we have to establish limits on the social networks.
The more I think about it, the analogy of educating our children is apt: we may have wonderful ideals that lead us to think that we shouldn’t restrict what our children want, but bringing up children is about establishing boundaries and making children understand that there are many reasons in life why we can’t have what we want. Education based on the constant granting of everything the child asks for is a damn disaster that generates unhappy human beings when they come across the reality of life in society and its many — and necessary — restrictions.
In the same way, once they reach a certain level of popularity, social networks need to be managed, because by that point, the people running them should have realized what happens when you allow people to give free rein to their worst instincts. Twitter’s problem is that it has been mismanaged, albeit in pursuit of seemingly noble ideal.
The management at Twitter are like the parents who ignore their children’s behavior as they run riot in a restaurant, ruining everybody else’s meal in the restaurant: sure, they’re only children, but that doesn’t mean they can’t and shouldn’t be controlled for the greater good. The problem Twitter faces now is the same as those parents trying to bring a spoiled teenager into line. Twitter’s intentions may been the best, but as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Society has rules not because we live in dictatorships, but because they are necessary for coexistence. Children need to learn these rules because they are necessary if they want to take part in society. The same applies to social networks and their users. The evidence speaks for itself.
(En español, aquí)
