James Poulos of The Daily Beast has published an article : How Block Bot Could Save the Internet. The article pains me, deeply, on many levels. First of all it pains me to see a journalist advocating such a system :
Meet The Block Bot, an invention of the social-justice left that allows people to automatically screen out disliked content and disliked people from Twitter. The Block Bot comes complete with a helpful hierarchy of disapproval, ranging from mere irritation to bigotry in the first degree. Some people who have been added to The Block Bot’s rolls have been offended, of course. But in addition to muting offense, The Block Bot dissipates rancor.
When I was a lad and I used to buy newspapers I’d regularly buy The Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. The Mirror is a left wing newspaper, The Mail is a right wing newspaper. Some days if I felt in the mood for a really good read, I’d buy The Guardian and The Times. The Guardian generally leans left, The Times generally leans right. Politically I’m on the left, however sometimes the right will say something I agree with. The idea that I should shut out any and all other ideology is completely against my beliefs and I simply don’t see it as healthy.
My big objection to blockbots are, for want of a better word, McCartyhist style guilt by association and allowing others to think for me. I say for want of a better word because McCarthyism was a far more serious issue than this and I don’t like appearing to belittle it by comparing it to some silly nonsense on the internet. However guilt by association is not something I can buy into on any level.
How silly people can get with their dogma was exemplified in horrendous style recently by Ben Kuchera of Polygon. Ben objected to EA head of communications Chris Mancil linking to a post of Ben’s on Chris’ personal blog. Ben’s objection was due to Chris’ post being critical of blockbots, even though in his post he agreed with Ben :
I had heard about these Twitter Auto-Blockers before, and thought the use of these tools to be extremely sad.
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One – because there are no proper harassment protection tools on Twitter, which Polygon’s Ben Kuchera has ingeniously identified the solutions for in this great piece. Which makes these tactics thinkable.
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Two – because these auto-blocker tactics leave no hope for change or progress. It’s the cement walls of the West Bank and Gaza, forever dividing the two groups which probably have more in common than not.
Ben Kuchera took to Twitter, tagging Chris Mancil’s employer, to demand the links were removed. Let’s just rewind here, a journalist took to Twitter to demand someone removed links to his work because he didn’t like someone agreeing with him in a post. I lost a lot of respect for Ben Kuchera over this.
There were parts of Chris’ post that were objectionable, a glaring example being comparing these blockbots to the issues in the West Bank, which is quite frankly a ridiculous comparison, but for Ben Kuchera to object to the degree he did was also absurd. The end result is that Chris Mancil’s blog is now set to private. As a journalist Ben Kuchera should be embarrassed about this.
However, let’s not kid ourselves here, the reason people turn to these blockbots is more often than not because they are fed up with being dogpiled and abused for having the temerity to have an opinion.
Whereas I am personally opposed to these blockbots, it would be futile in the extreme to ignore the reasons people use them. Twitter can be a very vile place, where people, and in all too many cases women, are bullied and harassed because they see things in a different light. Social media has a tendency to bring out the worst in people. I don’t know if this is because of the lack of face to face interaction and the people don’t get the same visual clues we do when we’re face to face or whether people just enjoy bullying in far larger numbers than I would like to believe, but online harassment is a very serious issue.
People turn to blockbots because they do not want to put up with the heinous crap that can come their way and they are, to a degree, effective in combating that. They catch far too many innocent people in their net for my liking, but they do appear to catch some of the more vile abusers, which is their intent. These blockbots have been created with good intentions, the delivery is, alas, muddy.
On Twitter I should be able to follow people without fear of being labelled a harasser. I don’t follow Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, but he’s a blockbot trigger character. Milo appeared on British TV at the weekend, whereas I often disagree with his views, I don’t think that taking note of his views should see someone labelled as a harasser. I’m open to hearing what he has to say and disagreeing vehemently with him. To me, that’s a far more healthy position for my mind than pretending he doesn’t exist.
Facebook’s approach is not something I agree with, but they expect people to use authentic identities, as Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently reported : Facebook Expressly Forbids Avatar Game Name Profiles :
People connect on Facebook using their authentic identities. When people stand behind their opinions and actions with their authentic name and reputation, our community is more accountable. If we discover that you have multiple personal profiles, we may ask you to close the additional profiles. We also remove any profiles that impersonate other people.
If you want to create a presence on Facebook for your pet, organization, favorite movie, games character, or another purpose, please create a Page instead of a Facebook Profile. Pages can help you conduct business, reach out to fans, or promote a cause you care about.
I dislike Facebook’s policy for many reasons. One being that Facebook encourages people to share far too much information with people they don’t know, which can and does lead to bullying. There’s also the issue of Facebook being a platform where it’s far too easy to signup with a fake name.
Twitter on the other hand probably leans far too much the other way. I’d like to be able to verify my identity on Twitter and get one of those ticks against my name. That way Twitter would know who I am, even if I’m using a pseudonym. I’m a big supporter of pseudonyms, I’m not such a big supporter of throwaway so called anonymous accounts.
Online harassment is an issue that needs to be tackled, whereas there’s only so much that can be done, people should be free to express an opinion without encountering vile abuse. Online communications are going to grow in the future, we are all far more likely to be doing more online in the coming years, not less. Online abuse needs to be taken seriously.
Whereas I don’t like blockbots, let’s not pretend that people use them just to be spiteful, they use them because the tools and means that should exist to combat online harassment simply aren’t there, it’s time for the social media companies to step up to the plate and put more power in the hands of their users, that way blockbots should be redundant.
I’ve heard that block bots don’t just block the tweets of those listed, but also flag them without warning, possibly leading to the termination of the senders’ Twitter accounts. Is this true?
I honestly don’t know but that sounds like something that would be sailing close to the wind in terms of Twitter’s terms of service.