And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that's ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don't necessarily like is part of being an adult.
This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.
As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them.
Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?
Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything.
Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.
Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.
I would think it became a replacement for an RSS feed (with pictures and drama)
How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?
But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block.
How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.
I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.
That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big).
Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.
But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.
It doesn't matter what side they are on, all that gets shared on twitter that would qualify as political is absolutely nauseating waving that sides flag and telling the world how stupid the other side is.
It would be better if it was blocked, preferably by default.
Not to spam, but here is a write-up if there is an interest in what and how it happened: https://hackernoon.com/how-i-got-myself-banned-on-twitter-43...
The bots are a problem as well, but they aren't what runs people off the platform.
Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?
The problem defined is that Twitter allows viral communication to occur in Humans, but which is being exploited in a very specific way by a small group of people who understand how to spread dissonant ideas by intentionally using polarized, meme-based arguments, which themselves are viral in nature. It's like a logic "jingle" you get stuck in your head. Or a virus.
It's on Twitter to fix the Pandora's Box they have opened with this type of infrastructure. (And I'm still sticking to my claim that Twitter is infrastructure given how much it can govern our behavior.)
I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..
They do, which is why it's reasonable to consider it a smoke and mirrors number.
A list of the largest Twitter shareholders[1] includes Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley etc. These folks really don't care about "engagement metrics", except as proxies for revenue.
This argument can hold for earlier-stage companies with investors hoping to sell at inflated valuations to a greater fool later in line, but once you've been publicly held for several years, it's quite a stretch. Whatever's hurting Twitter's ability to fix its problems, it isn't "investor pressure".
[1] http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-majo...
New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers
New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows
New account that starts and then immediately follows just a single person ever.
All of those are suspicious
>New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows
Both of these are also the behavior of people who use Twitter simply as a content stream. They pretty accurately describe how I use Twitter.
Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.
Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.
We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.
[1]:https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 [^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don't want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.
I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use/account abuse.
Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible.
I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.
I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there...
Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.
