Twitter’s New Abuse Policy: If It Can’t Stop It, Hide It.
Twitter is getting slightly quieter. That’s the gist of Twitter’s new changes designed to combat abuse, which it unveiled Tuesday. By its own admission, the social network has a problem dealing with abusive users: As Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote in a leaked internal memo, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” Every week seems to bring a new story of harassment: This weekend, U.K. food writer Jack Monroe quit Twitter after receiving a torrent of homophobic abuse. Lena Dunham quit in January, tired of threats and name-calling. Louis C.K. quit last week, not citing abuse but simply saying, “It didn’t make me feel good. It made me feel bad instead… It’s too instant.” Beyond the harrowing abuse, an outsized share of which is directed at women, Twitter increasingly resembles a school lunchroom where tribes of kids sling food at each other. A fix is long overdue. Still, what Twitter has announced won’t satisfy the company’s most vocal critics.
The network did itself no favors with the other new feature it revealed this week, one that lets users receive direct private messages from anyone, not just people they follow. While users must manually turn on this feature (no thank you) before the trolling floodgates open, journalists like Ezra Klein have criticized it and incorrectly suggested that users must opt out to avoid getting DMs from anyone. While Twitter should add an “Are you sure you want to do this?” confirmation to that feature’s opt-in, it’s clear from Tuesday’s announcement that Twitter’s evolving treatment of abusive content requires a careful reading.
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