Twitter Is Running Out of Time to Get Real About Fighting Abuse

Some say Twitter is out of excuses in its failure to fully address abuse. That’s a shame—because no other network has the same cultural currency as Twitter.
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Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

Another week, another eruption of abuse on Twitter. This time, it was Breitbart writer and self-anointed “supervillain of the Internet” Milo Yiannopoulos, whom the company finally banned after he stoked his followers into flooding Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones with hateful and racist messages. Yiannopoulos went so far as to tweet out fake screenshots of things Jones supposedly but did not actually say on Twitter. In the end, Jones said she would leave Twitter altogether:

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was apparently aware of the situation, tweeting at Jones as early as Monday evening. But Twitter still took another day to finally kick Yiannopolous off the platform after facing considerable public pressure. On Thursday afternoon, Jones posted a short tweet saying she was grateful for the public's support. “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,” Twitter said in a statement addressing the incident. “But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”

Well, fine. That was certainly the right thing for Twitter to do, and as no shortage of incidents show, dealing with online abuse effectively can be tricky. But after years of Twitter maturing as a community and a company, including a seemingly robust anti-abuse policy, what gives? Why didn’t Twitter take more decisive—and frankly, faster—action?

Yes, Twitter walks a fine line in balancing its identity as an open network for all views while at the same time reserving the right to police content so that a mob can’t overpower and harass a single user. And in a lot of ways, it’s made progress: it explicitly banned revenge porn last year. It routinely works with groups to refine its anti-abuse tools, and it hasn’t shied away from banning other high-profile users in the past, including pop star Azealia Banks and right-wing troll Chuck C. Johnson. But some say Twitter is running out of excuses in its failure to fully address this problem. And that’s a shame, because there’s no other network that has accrued quite the same cultural currency as Twitter.

Twitter’s Abuse Problem

The abuse problem is hardly new for Twitter. Seemingly every week, there’s news of yet another prominent user quitting the social network after facing harassment at the hands of a mob.

In some ways, despite being a decade old, Twitter may still be figuring out how to deal with these incidents as they arise. "This is a constant tension between Twitter’s different uses, and people having different standards, and having to do constant line-drawing, whatever your policy is," says James Grimmelmann, a professor of law who studies social networks and online communities at Cornell University. "With a service the size of Twitter, you’re going to have lots and lots of people pushing at the line." At the same time, Twitter has made a stronger commitment to free speech than other established social networks.

And in a way that makes Twitter a rare holdout among its rivals. "Twitter is one of the few platforms that is still trying to do old-fashioned-style Internet community, with pseudonyms, and this idea that anybody can connect to anybody,” says technologist and entrepreneur Anil Dash. "Twitter is having problems most other sites don’t because the other sites don’t work like the Internet used to."

Those sites—Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, in particular—curb the kinds of abuse endemic to open networks by enforcing a more closed culture that limits interactions to other users you've already approved. And in closing themselves off, those platforms lose the ability for a kind of live movement to get started and gain traction. Black Lives Matter, for example, flourished on Twitter first and foremost, not Facebook. “Openness has a lot of social value,” Dash says.

Still, Dash doesn't believe abuse has to be the price of openness. "You can absolutely do both. You can be large-scale and safe," Dash says. "But you have to invest in doing that."

Cultural Relevance

It's tempting to say that a failure to invest in more effective ways to curb abuse is at the heart of Twitter's problems, and that the failure stems from Twitter's struggles as a business. Since its founding in 2006, Twitter has gained 310 million monthly active users. But analysts say fewer than 140 million of them interact with the service daily. That’s a meager percentage compared to Facebook (more than a billion daily users) and possibly fewer than much younger rival Snapchat, which according to a recent report, just surpassed Twitter in daily users. Meanwhile, Twitter’s stock price has been meandering downwards for the past year. The pressure to add users and keep them is high.

"A lot of people would say, 'Of course they’re going to be reluctant and suspend accounts, if their whole issue is they’re not having enough growth,'" Dash says. But he suspects that’s not what’s going on here.

Twitter's cultural relevance has a value that transcends its raw user numbers, Dash says. Just look at how the Presidential election is playing out on the social network. The problem is rather that Twitter's seeming commitment to egalitarianism distorts how the site really works. Twitter doesn't operate like a voting booth—one person, one vote. It's a constellation of stars who have outsized influence and who garner outsized attention compared to most everyday users. And having that high profile turns those stars—as Dash knows from personal experience—into targets. Where a site like, say, YouTube openly acknowledges and cultivates its creators, leaving would-be abusers with just the comments section to vent their feelings, Twitter in its very structure creates a flawed kind of level playing field. "That privileges the abusers and harassers in seeming like they are peers to creators," says Dash.

Much more than just giving power users a blue "verified" checkmark, Twitter needs to elevate them and invest in better tools to help likely targets deal with the inevitable abuse they'll face, he says—better than the ones they have now. At the same time, it needs to be more transparent about how it addresses abuse across the board, since banning users in response only to high-profile incidents involving celebrities suggests exactly the wrong kind of favoritism. What about the abuse suffered by those who don't have millions of followers that doesn’t make the news?

"If this big area of mistrust really mattered to the company, then they would say, 'We’re going to fix it and this is the timetable in which were going to do it. And if we don’t, someone’s going to get fired,'" Dash says.

And for Twitter's sake, that timetable better be narrow. Otherwise, Jones isn't likely to be the last high-profile user threatening to quit. In a way, her being driven off the platform feels like a decisive moment for the company. Will other stars follow? That's an exodus Twitter really doesn't want. Once it begins, the time to fix its abuse problem may have already passed.