Twitter's Anti-Harassment Tools, Reviewed
They're just okay? The new ones recently announced seem the best yet.
www.forbes.com
Last summer, a mob of outraged keyboard warriors descended onto my Twitter doorstep. Mentions at 99-plus, threats, people longing for my slow painful death, for my life to be blown up. One YouTuber was literally fronting like he was Goku and going to Kamehameha me out of a job. You know, the works. It went on for weeks. Months, even.
This is a known problem for Twitter; it's been criticized for years as a prime breeding ground for harassment campaigns, some even positing distinct design flaws are tailor-made for this kind of mob abuse. After my most recent experience, I can safely report today that Twitter’s anti-harassment tools are... somewhat satisfactory!? To a degree. Generally just okay for being years late? I’m willing to go as far as a “very good but only under highly specific circumstances"… although, two brand new features in the works seem especially promising.
The current tools are a definite improvement from six years ago, to use a 2013 pro-life mob sent my way by Adam Baldwin. Yes, Twitter has made someprogress on this issue. Full disclosure: I’ve been subjected at least half a dozen Twitter mobbings now, with my first in 2012. A GIF of a woman opening up a can of a soft drink with a mood bubble of “Ahhh, the glorious life of a feminist online” would be appropriate here. Most mobbings lasted a weekend. If I could stay off the Twitter app that long, I was golden.
The 2019 Twitter toolkit for dealing with harassment includes algorithms, new reporting options and Advanced Quality filters. When used together, the platform is relatively tolerable during a massive mob onslaught. However, these tools can only do so much, and are useless when the harassment hits a kind of a critical mass and moves off the platform. Each Twitter tool described below has individual drawbacks as well.
I recommend utilizing multiple features as dependent on the unique circumstances related to your mob harassment.
The Advanced Quality filters
Unrolled in 2017, and refined in 2018, these features function as a massive Mute button. When they're all turned on, you really only get tweets from people you follow, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
Checking all the boxes, including the Advanced Quality filter, did a good job of catching the nastiest content. I am talking tweets filled with expletives and derogatory language as well as most of the brand new troll/ sock-bot accounts created explicitly to join the hater parade. My tweets at the height of the mob were spammed with pictures of blood, fetuses and guts, but these graphic images were also filtered out by Twitter’s algorithms. If I didn’t have to peek beyond the filters for research or work purposes, I would've never known about those tweets. However, the filter wasn’t perfect -- I received a notification when a verified Blue check-mark esports dude liked a tweet LOLing at me as the c-word.
Most quote-retweets were also not filtered, even when they were clearly abusive. I had to manually mute (block is also possible) the thread, or that user, depending. The Quote feature facilitated the already problematic practice of taking tweets out-of-context and did so at an exponential rate. In a September Twitter thread about mob harassment, professor and New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci proposed eliminating the new Quote tweet feature altogether.
The best reason to use Twitter’s filters is obvious -- taking time to individually mute and/or block people, especially at the height of online mob activity, is both time-consuming and mentally distressing. Another drawback to these filters is not everyone has them on -- not your co-workers, or in my summer example, the staff at Forbes and all former employers. In addition, since I was not actively policing or reviewing my mentions, some of my followers were exposed to hateful and abusive content. Some of my friends and the normal people of the internet interacting with me were attacked and I was unaware of it. The Advanced Quality Filter also prevented me from seeing benign, respectful or supportive tweets from regular users, too, and at some point, even from people I follow and who follow me.
Not reading all the hateful content sent your way definitely makes for a better user experience… but being unaware of tweets that threaten your safety, or your family is the opposite of being protected. Another downside to the Twitter filters: they penalize both new users who don’t have a lot of followers yet and users who need to maintain anonymity for political and security reasons. Not everyone is in a safe position geo-politically to verify their account by email or phone and just because they are new users with single digit followers doesn’t mean what they have to tweet is not worth being read.
Locking Your Account
I could have solved some of the mob harassment spilling onto my friends and followers by locking my account, instead of abandoning the platform like I did. Locking is a tool I relied upon in years prior and found incredibly helpful and is one of the better tools Twitter currently offers. Having a private account is a basic feature every other platform has, though, so this tool isn't particularly novel.
Benefits to locking your Twitter account include mobbers being unable to look through your tweets for targets to direct their anger at and it makes it more difficult for them to collect personal information about you or your family. Locking your account also breaks whatever tweet of yours is being Quote-tweeted, nulling any related harassment. I was unable to lock my account during the most recent mobbing because of contractual obligations.
You have the most control over your tweets and the conversation around your tweets when your account is locked.
Muting vs Blocking
As mentioned above, muting can have drawbacks as it still allows abusive or hateful users to target friends and followers you are interacting with online without your knowledge. I was the Mute button's biggest fan for years because I don’t like the idea of rewarding someone trolling or caught up in a mob with any kind of response from me.
Blocking someone can also adversely increase the blocked users Twitter cred (in this case usually a kind of serial platform abuser) and why make someone trying to make you look bad look good in any way? I also like to think that if I just mute the individual user, maybe they can still learn something from my tweets, like a different perspective they wouldn’t be able to access easily if I had just outright blocked them.
However, after my last mobbing experience, I am more willing to use the Block button. This time, I blocked a few anonymous users with big-enough-to-hurt online fanbases that repeatedly interacted with my tweets in a rude, defamatory or hostile manner. One of them was a primary harassment campaign architect that-- get this -- told his fanbase to attack me and Forbes (and was the one that called me a c-word) and then made a YouTube video about how he was viciously “harassed”... despite no online evidence to suggest this. This user is still on Twitter.
Blocking also doesn’t prevent a user from viewing your tweets if the abusive user is obsessively enraged enough -- they will continue to view your tweets via an incognito window and share screencaps of your tweets with his or her fanbase. Ask any of the dozen-plus professionals in the video-game industry that survived GamerGate (and those that did not), and you will hear similar stories of an angry mob doing this very thing. In fact, one of the anonymous users I blocked this time around was still obsessively screen capping and conspiracy theory-mongering about the original GamerGate target... from 2014!GamerGate gets brought up a lot in Twitter anti-harassment discussions and security circles, not because of “vengeance” or “feminists unable to let it go,” but because the controversy is the largest example yet of a harassment mob hitting critical mass, and hard. Twitter had to create more sophisticated anti-harassment tools because of it.
Blocking users also doesn’t prevent them from tweeting about you to anyone they like, including former employers. As I mentioned earlier, the mob copypasted my Twitter bio, which included recent outlets, and sent tweets to those publications. Anyone working social media at those publications was then subjected to hostile and nasty tweets, many defamatory in nature.
Blocking is considered by some to be Twitter’s strongest tool, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the mob once it has moved off the platform. And when the mob is at critical, blocking users actually becomes a complete waste of your time. Best to heavily restrict all social media and Internet use -- not just Twitter -- at this point and if you haven’t already notified your family, current and former employers and local police now would be a good time to do so. My Forbes editor called the Twitter mob’s calls to have me fired “an endorsement,” but other employers might not feel the same way should this happen to you.
Reporting Users
The first time I ever tried to report a tweet for violating Terms of Service was in April of 2014, and it was because a hacktivist was sharing revenge porn of another activist speaking out against rape. Twitter’s unsatisfactory response to that report is below:
I found the response heartless, including the onus on the user being harassed to file the report. Twitter took a serious step to stamping out revenge porn in 2017, but in many cases still requires the harassment target to be the one to file the report. Revenge porn is illegal in 43 states.
This time around, in 2018, I found Twitter to be a bit more responsive to my requests. I also think the unusually high level of activity around my account was on Twitter Support’s radar long before I contacted them. While I am thankful Twitter took action relatively quickly, which was mostly to lock the abusive accounts, that action felt like an empty punishment done more as a courtesy to show me they took my concerns seriously. The damage was done and required tools beyond Twitter to fix. As Zeynep Tufekci noted in that aforementioned twitter thread, locking an old abusive tweet “is of ZERO value to the person facing the barrage and ZERO deterrence to the harasser.” This minor punitive measure can also increase the locked user’s reputation in certain online circles, similar to blocking.
I realize my Report User experience may be atypical. Examples of Twitter not taking threats and abusive users seriously show up in the news all the time, including an incident where a failed serial pipe bomber sent threats to a woman on Twitter weeks before he went on his attempted explosive mailing spree.
The Report User function can also be used for abuse and to silence those being harassed. This tool also seems to miss more than it catches. Actual hate speech or derogatory slurs doesn't guarantee the tweet will be removed.
What Else?
Other possible tool ideas include one proposed by Tufekci, like designating tweets as unquotable or unembedable. Taylor Lorenz at the Atlantic proposed getting rid of the retweet altogether. I propose having the ability to lock certain tweets only (not your entire account), as in, that one tweet cannot be interacted with unless they are permitted followers.
Twitter’s two newest features, one to control what replies show up under your tweets while the other specifies what kind of personal information is being shared, might become the platforms best tools yet. Getting more specific details as to what counts as personal information would help Twitter to “move faster in reviewing reported tweets” the company wrote last Thursday.
Having the ability to moderate the responses to your tweets, announced February 28th, appears to be similar to a feature found on YouTube creators can use to moderate their comment sections.
On Twitter, this tool would also help harassment victims deal with the reputational damage that can come from mob harassment. For example, my mentions were filled with rampant speculation about my sex life, gender, appearance, mental health and my career and were no longer confined to the original subject matter that drew the mob in the first place. I had also applied to some jobs and gigs during that time and its possible prospective employers were turned off by all the derogatory and disgusting replies to my tweets.
TechCrunch reporter Sarah Perez theorized “putting the original poster back in control of which Replies are visible may allow people to feel more comfortable with sharing on Twitter, which could impact user growth — a number Twitter struggles with today.”
Amnesty International's Rasha Abdul-Rahim told NPR over the weekend when asked about the reply moderation feature, “I think there's a danger here of brushing the issue under the carpet, so brushing the issue of problematic tweets under the carpet and not holding people who are sending those tweets accountable."
When taken collectively, Twitter’s biggest issue with harassment is made all the more clear: reporting harassment still falls on the user being harassed while the platform abuser faces little to no punitive measures. YouTube bans a user permanently after they violate Terms of Service three times, maybe Twitter can implement something similar.
Tools ranked from most efficient at combating harassment to worst: Locking, Blocking, Advanced Quality filters, Reporting User, Muting.
Final arbitrary score: 3.4 out of 5 stars
