1/ Amid Twitter maybe getting rid of the "like" to promote "better dialog" and certainly giving safe haven to nazis and other extremists, a rant:
2/ You probably noticed how, people came forward to say that they'd reported the bomber for violent threats, and Twitter (as always) did nothing and (as always) now apologizes but (as always) won't say how they'll better handle. They won't, and I'll tell you one big reason why.
3/ to address complaints about threats and "improve the dialog" Twitter introduced the "quality filter." You see fewer threats and hate speech. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THERE'S LESS OF IT.
4/ So you, the Twitter user who's been getting threats, are lulled into a false sense of security. Somebody could be threatening to kill you all the time, but no worries, you wont see it. Upside for Twitter: fewer pesky reports of said threats.
5/ Am I, are you, safer because we see less threats and hate speech, who knows? But in some cases, almost certainly not. If I see a person threatening me, I can report the to Twitter, maybe to law enforcement, I can at the very least block them.
6/ But if I can't see it, I can't do any of that. And the threatener, depending on their psychological makeup, may be further enraged by being ignored.
7/ That's why it is so maddeningly offensive when people tell you to "ignore the trolls." Do you ignore the person calling your house? Stalking you? Some repeate behavior on Twitter is as bad as that and may be moving to act IRL.
8/ The bomber threatened everyone from @davidhogg111 to @mitchellreports to @AndrewGillum—all people who probably have real security counter measures at their disposal. Did they see those threats? Who knows?
9/ Some years back I got a lot of threats, including a guy promising to gut my child before he raped and killed me and who followed it up with snuff shots. Other journos/users saw it, tracked him down, and called law enforcement. Because we could all see it.
10/ Telling a person she should ignore threats, and going insofar as to shield her from seeing those threats while doing nothing about them does not make us more safe. It makes us less safe.
11/ But it DOES make it less likely that people will quit Twitter out of fear and disgust. And THAT is what Twitter cares about. Not our safety, that's been proven a million times over, but the numbers they can report to shareholders.
12/ We're basically living in the Twitter matrix that Twitter has constructed to pull the world over our eyes.
13/ This kind of thinking is not only (overwhelmingly white male) engineers not a) understanding the problem and b) thinking engineering is the way to solve it, it's also of a piece of the kind of patriarchal treatment that abuse survivors have suffered at the hands of police.
14/ Just like abuse victims, Twitter abuse victims are told it's all in our head, or all our fault, or don't worry, I've talked to him and he won't do it again. They've never tried to listen to users about what WE think would help because they just don't give a shit.
16/ But here's one of my many threads about why Prop C is a good idea for San Francisco:
