In the last few months I've seen some discussion on the exploitation of vulnerable aspects of twitter's rules by social justice warriors to silence political dissent by using bots to mass block or mass report so dissenters' accounts would be suspended. On October 29, I emailed press@twitter.com with questions, explaining my intent behind the request. I wanted to be up-front about the fact that this was for an article to ensure that their reply would consist of information they wanted known.
Recent trends in some groups' tweets have included referencing the
option included in the "block or report" menu to report another user for
content that is "Generally offensive, disrespectful or in disagreement
with my opinion." Some users are touting that option as a means to
silence political dissent. This sounded unlike a social site policy, and
led me to look further into the reporting options.
Further
investigation has only led to more questions, including questions about
other options for reporting. The help bubble for that option says
"Twitter does not screen content and does not remove potentially
offensive content unless such content is in violation of the Twitter
Rules and Terms of Service," so I have read those.
Some
of the twitter rules have wording which could be subject to broad
interpretation and potential abuse. I'm writing to request
clarification, as I am considering an article. My current focus is
communication, harassment, censorship, and how twitter's rules affect
engagement between users in relation to political and other potentially
controversial discussions. Any information I receive in response to
these questions will contribute to that article.
For instance, listed under "targeted abuse" are
- if the sole purpose of your account is to send abusive messages to others;
and
- if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats
What factors determine if the sole purpose of an account is to send abusive messages to others?
Is
disagreement with others' opinion considered an abusive message, and if
so does that mean engaging in debate by replying to publicly made
statements of opinion with counterarguments is now considered abuse?
If not, what is the specific reason for including "in disagreement with my opinion" in the harassment reporting options?
I
am assuming that tweets without @user mentions are not considered
"targeted" because they do not involve intentional contact and users can
block feed they do not want to see. Is this correct?
Does
"targeted abuse" include @user mentions without abusive language, but
which contain a dissenting counterargument to something the user has
said? (eg. I disagree with @twitteruser's stated opinion in
LinkToPublication because reason #politicalorsocialconcept or
@twitteruser I disagree with what you said.) If so, is that a blanket
rule or does the behavior have to be repeated or continue after the user
engaging in it has received some variation of "stop talking to me"
before it is considered to be in violation?
Does the tone of a
tweet change whether it is considered abusive, and if so what is the
criteria for that? ("I disagree with what you said" vs a similar line
containing expletives vs a line containing slurs or the suggestion that
the user deserves to suffer violence because of his opinion.)
Under the Spam heading are the following criteria:
- If you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of users in a
short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following
or follower churn);
When a political or social movement
forms on twitter, users often follow each other so that posts about
their specific pet issue will show up in their feed. Is it a goal of
twitter to prevent this, or does following require automated means in
order to be considered a violation?
- If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
Many
users post links to news stories, videos, and memes related to hashtags
created for issues and concepts that have meaning to them. Very often
these are, to the user, personal updates because they are new
information about the issue or concept. Will users whose personal
updates usually include links to information be considered spammers?
- If a large number of people are blocking you;
- If a large number of spam complaints have been filed against you;
This
looks like it could be used by ideological groups to silence popular or
very vocal users whose updates contain statements of opinion to which
they are opposed, by banding together to all block and/or report the
same person, thereby putting him or her in violation. What is twitter's
administration doing to counter potential abuse of these rules?
- If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #, trending or popular topic, or promoted trend;
There
are Twitter users currently interpreting this to mean that dissenting
views to a hashtag's political outlook and criticism of the belief or
assertion behind a hashtag can be considered spam if it is posted to the
hashtag. For example, posting an opposing viewpoint with a political
hashtag can offend the readers of the hashtag, but it's a discussion
attempt. Is it considered spam even if it is not belligerent or
threatening?
- Randomly or aggressively following, favoriting or Retweeting Tweets;
This
line is hard to interpret. Can you please give a more detailed
explanation of what it means? How does twitter determine when following,
favoriting, and retweeting are random or aggressive, and when doing
those things is acceptable?
Finally, do you have a policy in place
to deal with habitual, vexatious false flagging (users repeatedly
reporting content which does not violate rules or terms of service in an
attempt to silence speech they disapprove or people they dislike)? This
is a behavior I've seen on other social networking sites where
administrators have written and posted broadly interpretable policy
without stipulating that false exploitation of it would also lead to
discipline. What is Twitter doing to prevent users from banding together
to engage in this type of harassment, and how do you differentiate
between a user engaging in this and a user who spots or experiences and
reports a lot of genuine violations?
If you provide me with a
statement on the overall goal of Twitter's rules and guidelines as they
relate to discussion on the site, I will include that in the article.
If
you have any questions for me, please let me know, and I'll be happy to
clarify anything that has not come across clearly. Thank you in advance
for taking the time to address these questions. I hope to produce an
article that will bring about better understanding of Twitter's rules
and their relationship to the many discussions among users of the site.
To date I have not heard back. I cannot be sure if this is simply due to their staff for handling press requests being small and unable to keep up, or if they are avoiding answering the question. Even if it is the latter, it could be because, now that they realize there are holes in their policy they want to fix them before replying. It could also be due to a desire to leave those holes in place without having to answer for them. The only way to know would be to hear back from twitter, and that is out of my control.
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