The whole "dedication to free speech" mantra is cute, but ultimately just reeks of a failed bet on how to run the company.<p>From a technical perspective, letting essentially anyone say anything is easier to handle. The engineering resources that would otherwise go towards advanced content filtering and detection, etc can now just focus on making the platform scale. That works out well when a company is growing like crazy in the early days.<p>From a business perspective, the hate-spewing users are "really engaged with the product." Having a lot of users in this category is a great thing to tell investors. Also, the growth from these users is something investors like, too. So it's also a win from a business perspective.<p>I'm guessing that Twitter's leadership made a decision early on. Something along the lines of "let's go with the free speech thing for now. It lends itself to efficient allocation of engineering resources and improving key metrics." When you're growing as fast as Twitter in the early days, it's not necessarily a bad choice. However, the current growth stagnation and other negative issues surrounding the company is really starting to expose the downsides of that haphazard decision.
There should be a separate domain for buzzfeed's long form articles. I suppose I could make an anti-listicle filter but having it be explicit would be nicer.
Twitter is a cesspool, but isn't an open, public conversation between everyone in the world pretty much guaranteed to be a cesspool? I don't see how you can stop that from happening without compromising the principle of Twitter itself.<p>You take on risks when you start announcing your private thoughts to the widest possible public audience. Those risks go along with being any kind of public creator. Other than because no one would really be interested in my tweets anyway, this is precisely the reason why myself and others exercise our free choice not to tweet. We don't want a trail of statements for which we are publically held to account, even if by harassers, racists and misogynists, if we can't - and shouldn't - control the audience for those tweets. If you want a limited, curated audience, go somewhere else.
The omissions from this article are kind of strange.<p>For example, it somehow manages to ignore the many harassment campaigns against various white people (e.g. Justine Sacco, Pax Dickinson, Brandon Eich, Milo) who's politics don't conform (or based on a single tweet, appear not to conform) to what is acceptable.<p>Or it brings up Leslie Jones, but then completely ignores all her racist tweets and calls for follower to harass others: <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-leslie-jones-racist-twitter-history/" rel="nofollow">http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-le...</a><p>That sure is weird.<p>[edit: clarified my point better.]
I always thought Ashley Judd was the first big harassment story on Twitter. Here is her account of it. Though I remember it happening earlier than 2015. Maybe there are multiple incidents.<p><a href="https://mic.com/articles/113226/forget-your-team-your-online-violence-toward-girls-and-women-is-what-can-kiss-my-ass#.Pmx00Qq6t" rel="nofollow">https://mic.com/articles/113226/forget-your-team-your-online...</a>
If drawing the line on what is and isn't harassment is subjective, perhaps they should focus on building better mechanisms for individuals to take filtering / blocking into their own hands? One could argue that Twitter has these features already, but apparently the "privileged class" (celebrities) are incapable of leveraging them?
Depends on what people decide IS harassment, in this survey <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37025554" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37025554</a> 52% of women said unwelcome jokes heard years ago amounted to harassment.<p>who objectively decides what is and isn't?
The internet will always have trolls and always had trolls. Twitter as a platform doesn't do anything differently than the old IIRCs or forums when it comes to this.<p>It's that whole people behind an anonymous screen are assholes because they can thing.