Yeah. There have been a few instances of this already. Not just trolls, but journalists, people discussing politics, etc. I feel like Twitter trying to bend over to appease the people who want to combat unpleasantness online will have more unintended consequences.
I predict those kinds of problems will only get worse and more numerous on Twitter because going easy on assholes and not standing up against them for the benefit of your good users is a great way to send a message that you "want" more of the former and less of the latter.
From Twitter's perspective, I'm figuring they see these people not as a political movement, but simply as a nest of trolls, who go around harassing people and inciting mobs and are thus poison to the network.
My experience is a lot like that. However one of the core issues Twitter has had in the recent past is that many users were not experiencing polite conversation on twitter. They were experiencing harassment instead.
Absolutely. Twitter (and similar social media) have become a cesspool for negativity, flame wars, left-versus-right, and spam that make it intolerable.
So then twitter dies and something better takes it's place. I really don't see a way out of this. I mean if random people being mean is the issue what can they do? Other than start monitoring and censoring everything tweeted
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.
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.
A lot of people did that years ago, when Twitter's response to a notorious Twitter troll being elected as President of the United States was to modify their TOS so that there's a "newsworthiness" carve-out that keeps trolls on Twitter.
twitter is just a cesspit now. I have watched this happen to my own country (the UK) with trolls and bots constantly pumping out anything which gets an emotional reaction of outrage.
What worries me is this — Outrage creates “engagement”.
A site like Twitter could easily capitalize on this and allow/promote outrage content in the near term, boosting their profits and causing long term side effects to societies as a whole.
As a non Twitter user, I’m curious how this social experiment will play out.
Twitter has been a pit of outrage, fuelling mobs to attack people for so long — will this new version of it be any worse? I’m curious to find out (from the sidelines)
I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.
Twitter is such a weird echo chamber of madness. People there will get themselves so twisted up about nonsense and just end up feeding the trolls. Unfortunately, it starts leaking out into regular society.
Twitter is the greatest platform for people getting offended on behalf of other people. I bet these armchair warriors will tweet-spam those guys to death.
Serious response: Wouldn't that be good for Twitter to get rid of those people? It's like when Coinbase offered people a payout if you're not 100% onboard with there mission and told people to stop talking politics.
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