Twitter is built for harassing. The medium makes it inevitable. you make a tweet and you shoot it out into the ether. It ends up on a couple million twitter feeds whether they asked for it or not. It angers some of those people, and they retweet it to show their followers how stupid you are. Now all their like-minded friends see that tweet in their feeds. A bunch of them are now aware of your existence and are mad and tweet back at you. This is far worse when you participate in a contentious issue on a hashtag. This is before you even get into hate-following and active-deliberate harassers. Then there is scale. There are a couple hundred million people on Twitter. If even .01% of them are sociopaths, that is a near-unmanageable problem.<p>Finally, a significant portion of Twitter is quite literally trolls trolling trolls. They both can dish it out and take it and don't see the problem. Good for them, but it's not compatible with everybody else.
I think anonymous accounts should be expensive (in terms of time) to set up. Anonymity and pseudonyms are important for those who need to whistleblow or are from oppressed groups so the possibility absolutely needs to be preserved. But what isn't needed is cheap throwaway accounts that can be used for abuse and then discarded as soon as they are banned.<p>If to sign up anonymously you had to do something, a quiz or play through a game that took about 30 minutes then that would reduce the rate of account creation for abuse. If you were prepared to give a real phone number (and use it for verification) then you could bypass the task and get an instant account but obviously any ban would apply to the phone number not just that particular account.
Who defines harassment? I've seen someone be banned from Twitter for criticising someone they've never even contacted. The Verge, in one article, along with actual threats, said a person who did not threaten but simply insulted another person was a harasser. People in arguments publish other people's phone numbers to a few thousand followers, they'll drop off and then come online again. AFAICT the argument goes that if you insult someone, it's 'calling them out' but if someone insults you it's 'harassment'.
Twitter isn't alone in this. Facebook and Snapchat both have issues with harassment. YikYak had a bad case of it too. I think that if these companies really care about curbing harassment, they would approach each other and tackle the issue together. If someone is trolling on facebook, they probably do it on twitter too.<p>Riot Games (League of Legends) has The Tribunal, where players who harass get judgements handed down from other players. Perhaps social media needs a tribunal of sorts, with participation from Twitter et al to enact "sentences".