I was driving home from work the other week listening to BBC Radio 4 when I heard an excerpt from a forthcoming television documentary. The excerpt featured the agent of a woman who is infamous in the UK for being controversial, and that seems to be her main talent. The excerpt had a point that was rather sad, the agent admitted that his client deliberately targets Twitter trolls by spelling words incorrectly on purpose or making outrageous comments. He admitted that without the Twitter trolls, his client would not be so successful.
At this point it is worth noting that picking someone up on their spelling isn’t exactly trolling, but the concept that people deliberately court controversy and know that this will work on Twitter to generate revenue, is rather depressing.
Twitter continues to make headlines for the wrong reasons but those of us who have been in Second Life for a number of years know that those headlines can be very misleading. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has an article about Twitter : Twitter CEO Basically Admits Pseudonym Policy a Disaster. That headline itself is a tad misleading as I can’t see anything from Twitter CEO Dick Costlolo that suggests that. However Hamlet’s article links to another article on The Verge : Twitter CEO: ‘We suck at dealing with abuse’. In that article Dick Costolo is quoted as saying :
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”
I use Twitter, I’ve seen the trolls in action, I’ve seen the heinous abuse but if Twitter was as bad as some folk make out, I would not be on Twitter. The problem with Twitter is not pseudonyms. Over time, even with a pseudonym, you build up a reputation of sorts, you own your words. The problem with Twitter isn’t accounts who don’t say much but use a pseudonym either. Whereas people can demonstrate horror stories from Twitter to try and claim pseudonyms are a problem, the same thing can be done on Facebook with people using their real names. Names aren’t the issue here, people are and more to the point, the way we interact online.
Online communications are largely faceless. We don’t see the person we’re talking to, we lose the tips that guide us in a face to face conversation. We lose sight of emotion, intent and humour and we focus on the words. On a platform such as Twitter where you’re restricted to 140 characters, this doesn’t make for a healthy meeting of minds when it comes to debate.
A few weeks ago I suggested to someone on Twitter that they may well be getting the wrong end of the stick about a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, the person who had tweeted was citing it as a sign of Charlie Hebdo’s racism, I disagreed and said :
No it is not, it’s criticising those in France who were saying Muslim women were welfare queens.
For this the original author blocked me, a friend of his blocked me, and then the original author unblocked me so he could say :
Like clockwork. Funny how to my fellow white people it’s never ever really real racism “in context”.
At this point, I gave up trying to explain a different opinion to the original author, it simply wasn’t worth the hassle. The problem with 140 character debating is that you don’t have time to expand before you get jumped all over.
Most of my time on Twitter is tweeting blog posts, retweeting other blog posts or abusing Strawberry Singh. Strawberry abuses me back and then some, don’t worry folks! Anyway, Twitter to me is not a good platform for debating, it’s a good place for keeping track of events, it’s bloody marvellous at that. I can recall a time when my lights in my house went off three times and my computer rebooted along with it, when everything settled down I went to Twitter and quickly searched for power cuts in my area, to find people talking about power cuts in my area. Marvellous!
I’ve spent a lot of time in my day job this week in training courses on safeguarding children, it’s a responsibility for all staff but some staff are more involved than others. We monitor social networking for cyber bullying. We respond to reports of cyber bullying. Lots of organisations similar to the one I work for will be doing the same, they will have teams of people looking for signs and signals. That’s what you need to do to try and stop cyber bullying and even then, there’s lots you won’t see.
Twitter, who are dealing with adults and children face an almost impossible task here. There are things that can be done to improve Twitter’s abuse procedures and one of those may well mean requiring a dedicated team to not only respond to abuse, but to actively seek it out, but the sheer number of Tweets mean this is not a task that Twitter can guarantee will work.
When it comes to names, the more real details people share, the more they are likely to be a target beyond Twitter. Social Networking policies in the workplace often encourage the use of pseudonyms as a way of encouraging free speech but trying to discourage you from bring your workplace into disrepute. Real name policies stifle debate and make people a target. Pseudonyms are something we should fight for, even if you yourself are happy to use your real name. To quote Oscar Wilde :
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
The ultimate responsibility lies with those who Tweet, for them to understand that words can upset people, that threats aren’t funny and that 140 characters don’t make for a good debating platform. Pseudonyms are not the problem on Twitter, people are.
You and your damn “toxic cultural ideas.”