It's not. I mentioned it because The Verge said insulting someone was 'harassment'. It isn't, either by the common definition or by Twitter's terms of service.
A simple test: if you think insults should be considered harassment, would you support your own Twitter account being blocked for insulting someone?
People argue over seats on a train. Someone calls the other person a 'selfish prick'. Does the insulted person have the right to remove their 'harasser' from the train? Do you think they should?
If you or a member of your side insulted someone, would you support yourself/them being banned from Twitter?
> The train conductor reserves the right to eject passengers who are being disruptive or abusive of other passengers in that scenario.
That's correct. So is the person who took the seat disruptive, or the person who insulted the person who took the seat disruptive?
Where there are only insults, and not threats involved, this is not a clear matter of right vs wrong. Both sides are saying things about the other that the other side doesn't like.
And repeating the question:
If you or a member of your side insulted someone, would you support yourself/them being banned from Twitter?
The "relentless" part is critical for whether insults (or even just continued asking of questions or repeating points) are harassment. Especially if the insult isn't profane - e.g. "idiot". To what extent is it OK to tell someone they are being an "idiot" or "are an idiot" when they say something idiotic. Some people have even taken to being insulted by being called "sexist" or "racist".
The difficulty comes when someone is relentlessly harassed by a large group such that each individual's insults on their own wouldn't be harassment. The recipient is being harassed but I'm not sure what the correct response is in this case. Also it is difficult to see the size of the group and who is actually involved if there are many throwaway anonymous accounts. There is also a hard to make distinction between a large group responding to something and calling it out following it being retweeted (which might briefly feel like harrassment) and a group organising and deliberately trolling people or jumping into every conversation they have.
These are tricky questions and I don't have answers to everything. Threats of violence while horrible are at least a simple and clear cut case that can be responded to (ideally with at least a police visit/warning rather than just a ban from the service). That does not make them the only sort of real harassment but it is in a way easy to deal with.
The "relentless" part is critical for whether insults (or even just continued asking of questions or repeating points) are harassment. Especially if the insult isn't profane - e.g. "idiot". To what extent is it OK to tell someone they are being an "idiot" or "are an idiot" when they say something idiotic. Some people have even taken to being insulted by being called "sexist" or "racist".
This is another sort of claim that pops up a lot in freeze peach[1] debates, where we pretend that reasonable people do not exist, and treat all claims as somehow equal and thus intractable. This is complete nonsense, and something the sane society largely doesn't have as much of a problem with as the internet does, at least as argued by those still desperate to defend the right to an audience for invective.
I do agree with you that it can be picked apart but it is very hard to do with simple rules.
Society does have problems with it in many areas but most noticeably to me around the intersections of race, religion and politics. Can criticising the Israeli government be anti-semitic? (It probably can be but the accusation is levelled as a defence against normal criticism). At what point does criticism of Islam or particular practices become problematic, Islamaphobic or racist? There isn't a clear line that everyone can agree on.
I think we probably agree on the answers we would like for these things and especially our views about "those still desperate to defend the right to an audience for invective" but it isn't always easy to set rules and operate systems to keep it working.
Coming from experiencing extreme verbal abuse offline, id counter by expressing how even just talking about and repeating forms of verbal abuse is dangerous.
Maturing moderation through systems such as Aether (http://www.getaether.com) is going to need free speech to evolve systems to filter freely.
Social media support group systems struggle with talking about trouble directly because we're waging war on words, when we still need to start addressing battles.
I am totally onboard with better self-moderation tools; I'm a proud user of BlockTogether and theBlockBot, they've made Twitter almost 100% more pleasant to use than it was before.
I've even had some ideas myself on apps that might provide better platforms for some, I just haven't got the chops to pull it off yet. In particular I think we need more platforms that allow public address without the implicit expectation that doing so makes you open season for every anonymous troll on the internet.
I think that services as well can do a better job turning all this 'big data science' to problems like this; it doesn't take a genius to realize that if a Twitter account pops up with no followers and its first few dozen messages are all loaded with invective and little else, maybe that account wasn't made in good faith.
Committing ignorance can be read as trolling and dangerous, so problem-solving by forcing a win-lose memory process, ends by repressing asking to account for any deeper empathic accuracy of a real stable log.
What genius is let go is if we can design a system that lets users filter, and share filters, without categorically/deleteriously removing parts of people's real life data we have trouble with.
If we want to wholly deal with safety, sanity, abuse, pain, and words we equate power to record, we need to be able to read and write by sorting with due diligence enough to keep every end together, every bit of speech a turn worthy of ID, and then let users tool ways to filter, tag, label, and identify problems openly.
Yes, you just wish to valiantly defend the right to berate someone in a public place, to the extent of dithering over which forms of base harassment you consider perfectly within rights apparently.[1]
This is the "freeze peach" argument all over again, and does nothing to dispute my point; it rather demonstrates it quite effectively.
So I ask again, since you're so fond of leading questions: why should the internet be 'special' as regards the consequences of being a twat to other people, be it in public or in private?
Twitter is under no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to allow you to call someone a "despicable whore" on their website.
> Yes, you just wish to valiantly defend the right to berate someone in a public place,
No. You're making up a straw man again. The 'freeze peach' thing is childish.
In my post you link to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9002479 I said that insults are not harassment according to the Twitter ToS. That is different from condoning harassment. You're probably smart enough to know that, but are trolling.
I never said the internet should be special: this is another straw man, and seems to be projecting a little about your own position: you don't have a right not to be insulted in real life, and you don't have one on the internet.
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