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.
For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play.
You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
This is analogous to all those arguments that "If you have nothing to hide, you have ", or, "If you want privacy, you always have the option to become a hermit and live completely off the grid with no contact with friends or family" What if I want privacy and to participate in modern society? Why should I have to choose?
It's the same here: Twitter, for all its faults, is very useful. Why should I have to choose between not using it and enduring a bunch of abuse on it, if Twitter can fix that? To protect the "right" of some anonymous shitheads to have victims be forced to listen to their harassment? Please.
You keep replying in this thread but you keep making the same error because you're starting from the axiom that "blocking is bad" and deducing forward from there. I reject that axiom.
> Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds.
First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level. But even if it were true, it would not be a reason for Twitter not to attempt anything. Again, you're starting from entirely the wrong premises here.
Show me an example of where I said this. What I've been saying is that attempts to programmatically weed out this type of behavior and the accounts that people create to perpetuate it will ultimately be ineffective. What's the difference between 10 people telling you to kill yourself and just 1, because the other 9 got blocked? Is that not still an unacceptable level of harassment?
>First of all, this isn't true: plenty of platforms have "good enough" moderation that harassment is either eliminated or at least reduced to a tolerable level.
Do you have an example?
There are third party tools that make the block button cost less, but it would be even better if they were built in to Twitter, and even better yet if the bot networks were not allowed.
But one last thing: if it's as abhorrent as you seem to actually think it is, stop caping for them as being something that can't be stopped. Because you help them by doing so.
Okay, then please, "educate me". I'm not being sarcastic, either. I'm a middle class straight white man and I will freely admit that I don't understand the plight of many minority groups, and certainly not in the context of twitter or other social media. My beliefs are not set in stone, and I have never been dismissive of someone who has the desire to share their experience with me so I have a better understanding. Regardless of my understanding, though, I'm pretty sure I will still feel that removing oneself from a harmful environment is a pretty effective tool, regardless of the type of harm being put upon you.
What I see more often than not in this situation, however, are responses that are dismissive instead of educational -- like saying the conversation is fruitless. I have seen conversations like this come up before, where the "right wing" side, being much less moderate than I am (and I consider myself to be pretty liberal for the record), opens themselves up to learn more about the situation only to be met with responses like "I don't have time for this" or "educate yourself", which is about as effective as telling someone to RTFM. Only the manual is about someone else's beliefs and feelings, and it doesn't actually exist.
So please, if you have the time, tell me what I don't understand.
I'm a (democrat) mixed race woman, and I get more harassment and vitriol from "tolerant liberals" when I post anything remotely in support of the president than I ever do from "white supremacists or anti feminists". I have noticed if I don't go right down the party line on an issue, I'm attacked violently. The "N" word I get called frequently is Nazi, not the other.
I'm not trying to say your experiences are invalid, I believe you're experiencing it, but I think assigning it to one political party or movement is inaccurate. It's really just the culture of Twitter, and maybe society in general.
There's a difference of kind here.
The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt, and he was targeted and destroyed by the jackals of the left.
Bill Maher was the arguable catalyst of it, and he said the exact same thing Milo did, and WORSE things in support of pedophilia and we didn't call him out for it. No media blitz, not cancelled events/shows/etc. Nope, Maher is a hero!
All that does is show the "values" we exited Milo with were not true because we don't apply those values to our own people.
The most non-snarky way I can put this is: "Citation needed".
Something that is a left leaning/liberal phenomenon almost exclusively from my experiences is the propensity for shouting a statement into public, and then claiming that anyone who has the temerity to reply to their tweet with anything other than wholehearted agreement is "harassing them", and then immediately blocking them.
The right leaning/conservative types tend to argue back with you, perhaps using strong language. Conservatives tend to call you an idiot libtard sheep, liberals tend to call you a racist sexist bigot.
(This is one of the benefits of being centrist: both sides don't like you.)
This happens when replying to liberal leaning commenters with such regularity that I have taken to mentally rewriting "harass" to "disagree" in the context of Twitter.
I've been blocked and called a harasser on Twitter for calling shenanigans on a comment in a much more gentle way than I did above. Have I just harassed you? Twitter's community, and increasingly, their management, would say yes.
To be completely fair, they will remove people for blatantly racist/sexist/homophobic tweets, and often do, where "f* white males" talk is completely allowed there.
> Or, you know, we can fucking not do that.
> Stop normalizing evil.
Your rhetoric is very emotional, and you want to use "abuse" a s an excuse to ban people who simply disagree with you ("anti-feminists", really?). I don't think people who share your views should be given the power to control discourse[0]. It's funny that you insult the "alt-left" ("bernie bros") when many would define the alt-left as the regressive left, in other words those who want to ban people simply because they disagree, like you're trying to do.
[0]: especially since you could argue that Twitter is the #1 platform for political discourse in the US, and is therefore vital for free speech (not as a legal obligation, but moral principle).
