How To Tackle Twitter Abuse?

I Like Twitter, I really do and I suspect a lot of you feel this way, for reasons that go beyond 140 characters. It’s hard to believe that Twitter turns just 11 this month, given the profound impact this tween has had on free speech and the democratisation of discourse.

It’s where news breaks, where people opine without the fear of retribution, and where you get a direct and frequent insight into what world leaders think (some would say too frequent, but that’s for another discussion!) It isn’t even a stretch to say twitter is the sort of technology phenomenon that has changed my life, and that of millions of others.

But Twitter has a problem, and it’s not just quarter after unprofitable quarter. The posterchild for free speech has become a platform for vile abuse and widespread harassment. Twitter’s once civil discourse has all too often degenerated into conversations so toxic that they flirt dangerously with various civil and criminal laws — bullying, defamation, stalking, death threats — the works! Express a lot of opinions on Twitter? It’s almost a given you’ll be at the receiving end of a blitzkrieg of profanities and obscene diatribe.

The sad bit is that for a problem that’s plagued its platform for years, Twitter’s done little to fix it. Even the recent changes to its harassment control tools — from using algorithms and human intervention to keep banned users from creating multiple new accounts to a “safe search” feature that hides sensitive content from search results and even automatically burying ‘low-quality’ abusive replies from throwaway accounts — seem a bit like the firm is paying lip service without tackling the real issue.

I mean, why is Twitter any different than any other social context? Would you walk into a party or an office and make broad threats of violence, rape or murder in the most abusive manner possible and expect to walk away without consequence? Twitter needs to stop sitting on neutral ground and expecting that users will behave like mature adults and sort the messy situation out themselves. Instead, the firm needs to come out guns-a-blazing and banning harassers and dedicated troll accounts that routinely intimidate other users.

As I write this, Twitter’s rolled out a system that detects a pattern of abuse — not a single tweet, mind you — and docks the abusive account with a temporary timeout.

Twitter hasn’t detailed the criteria for fear that trolls will game the system, but if an account is flagged as being abusive, Twitter hides its tweets from anyone who isn’t following it, typically for 12 hours for a first offence. For average folks like you and me, that’s great news — if an abusive troll responds to you or quotes your tweet with an insult, you simply won’t see it. It’s a step in the right direction, but the company needs to do much, much more if it is to attract decent people and more first-timers to the platform.

To be fair to Twitter, there’s only so much a company can do at scale to detect and deter the wildly errant behaviour that is sadly a representation of where we are as a society. There’s a delicate balance between protecting one user’s interests without curtailing the free speech or need for anonymity of another. How Twitter responds in the face of its greatest challenge today will be key to its future.