This isn't a new phenomenon. You raise literally anyone's hackles on twitter and you can potentially get swatted and harassed off the internet.
Dong Nguyen was run off the internet for a fun little mobile game that some people on Twitter got frustrated by. Scott Cawthorne was unpersoned when he gave money to the GOP. Lindsay Ellis made a single wrong step and was bullied and harassed by the type of people upset about Kiwifarms now. Hell, there's a fresh 2 minutes hate every day on Twitter that leads to someone completely irrelevant having their life ruined because they didn't like something popular.
This wouldn't be a problem if people removed their identity from the internet and just started doing everything anonymously, but apparently ego is a monetisable commodity now.
Twitter really brings out the worst in people. While accounts aren't ID verified, this sort of abuse won't be affected. Let's just face it, people really suck behind an anonymity curtain.
Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day.
This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet
It's ego-centric behaviour which leaves everbody worse off. Thank god it's only a Twitter account name! (...and not global politics governed by old farts out of touch with reality, which is another area where this behaviour is rampant)
I disagree, saying something outrageous on Reddit or 4chan is almost without consequence, given the anonymity on these forum.
The problem is people on Twitter putting their real name out and expecting no consequences for their actions everytime they tweet something.
Twitter is open AND people chose to reveal their true identity ... what could go wrong ?
Twitter is a wonderful tool for businesses to create channels. If you have something to sell yes you should absolutely be on Twitter, if not, at least stay anonymous while going on rants or when saying questionable things. She should have.
"Nasty" seems like an understatement, and it wasn't like they were hiding behind anonymity. So I have little sympathy in that case. You say terrible things on a twitter account in your name, directed at someone else, it might come back to bite you.
"Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized."
This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get?
OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?
These people have always existed. They will continue to exist. They will continue to find ways to harass the people they see as easy targets because they find enjoyment in it. Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.
For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play.
You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
Twitter had become a powerful mechanism to lodge complaints, vid and invalid.
Companies often will immediately take notice of someone they’d dismissed via traditional channels.
Harassment, racism, juvenile immaturity, etc., are also called out via Twitter. Sometimes they are legitimate grievances, other times not.
But there is almost never any due process and as infrequently are there repercussions for liars, people looking for someone to silence, or simple malicious intent.
This is as bad as “disinformation”. It’s ruining many innocent peoples lives, but Twitter couldn’t care any less.
Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.
This is one of the reasons I will never get a personal Twitter unless it was for a project or other business. I've read too many times of a person harassed and suffered real-life consequences for a fairly innocuous comment.
The rest of the posted article is excellent. Going to re-read it from time to time to see if I'm falling into the ruts described there.
"It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out."
Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.
I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.
Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.
The problem here isn't the notion of personal Twitter accounts. It's Twitter itself.
Twitter is designed to be encourage users to post things without thinking too hard about it. So they do, and sometimes that results in them saying stupid things that they would never have said if there had been even a tiny speed bump along the way to force them to think about it. Then they get in trouble if they're lucky, or lose their jobs/suffer social ostracism if they're not so lucky.
The problem is that Twitter's design is at odds with its actual nature. It's designed to feel breezy and conversational, but it's really about publishing, with all the permanence and exposure that implies. If you say something dumb in a conversation, it floats away on the wind unless someone else involved makes a concerted effort to tell people about it. If you say something dumb on Twitter, the ease of re-tweeting can make it blow up into a Big Thing in minutes.
If people keep shooting themselves in the foot with significant real-world consequences while using your application, year after year, it seems reasonable that at some point people would start wondering whether it was the fault of the application instead of the users. But Twitter apparently has not reached that point yet.
I can't believe this is getting downvoted. So let me add to it: The thing about @pmarca was that his tastes were eclectic and many of his thoughts were original, so whether he was tweetstorming his opinions to be met with furor, or retweeting other accounts, you had a high density of tweets you'd want to read. There are a lot of spambots and content marketers on Twitter, and he wasn't one of them. So it's a loss to the ecosystem. On the other hand, he got into trouble on Twitter, and as a famous person, he was probably accosted and harrassed by pseudonymous morons, which is a much wider problem Twitter has to address. I personally think that if Twitter tires you out, you're not doing it right: turn off the notifications, allow yourself to interact for 30min out of every 24h and you're golden.
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.
Just wait a bit, and the internet will find its new flavor of the week. Nobody who saw the tweets will recognize you three days later, or remember those first opinions.
You're right that it's not exactly the same scenario, but I'd argue that this new thing is still not as bad as before. Being embarrassed to people who know you is much worse than being embarrassed to people who don't.
I think it's the public ridicule aspect which is new, thanks to everyone using twitter like it's their backyard, and forgetting it's a mouthpiece to the entire earth.
Twitter has already done essentially nothing about overt threats, much less vague ones, against anyone who wasn't a twitter-staff legible good-guy celebrity.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
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.
Dong Nguyen was run off the internet for a fun little mobile game that some people on Twitter got frustrated by. Scott Cawthorne was unpersoned when he gave money to the GOP. Lindsay Ellis made a single wrong step and was bullied and harassed by the type of people upset about Kiwifarms now. Hell, there's a fresh 2 minutes hate every day on Twitter that leads to someone completely irrelevant having their life ruined because they didn't like something popular.
This wouldn't be a problem if people removed their identity from the internet and just started doing everything anonymously, but apparently ego is a monetisable commodity now.
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