They fucking suck at dealing with abuseIn a move that should surprise no one, the CEO of Twitter one Dick Costolo has come out recently in an internal forum stating that he takes personal responsibility for the failure of Twitter to take care of abusive trolls who target people for their own amusement and sometimes drive them to suicide. More after the quote.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is taking personal responsibility for his platform's chronic problems with harassment and abuse, telling employees that he is embarrassed for the company's failures and would soon be taking stronger action to eliminate trolls. He said problems with trolls are driving away the company's users. "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. "It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."
This is something that surprises me but doesn't. Twitter is in fact losing money due to the trolling and I'll give some examples in a second. Users feel that reports of violations of twitters TOS are not even being looked at by real human beings. I have an example. Most recently, female members of Channel Awesome, as well as former female members of Channel Awesome, were targeted by a troll named DannyWiiU. This is a man who's one goal in life was to have female celebrities burp for him on camera as that's his fetish. The one person he did go after the most was Lindsey Ellis the former Nostalgia Chick. He escalated to threatening to kill her boyfriend Todd in the Shadows as well as her dog Kali and rape her to death if she didn't comply. Despite numerous reports, he kept getting back on twitter with new handle after new handle, expanding to other people. Not sure what's happened to him as he's kinda dropped off the face of the earth but I'm hoping he's in jail.
Of course that's just one example. I could tell you the tale of Anita Sarkeesian who decided to document the abuse she routinely gets in one week. But that would give UP a Gamergate opening and this is not what this is about. What this thread is about is how much cyberbullying is almost a thousand times worse then real life bullying. With real life bullying, you're dealing with a person you can smack. Cyberbullying is trickier because the person making your life hell could be on the other side of the world or something. The authorities cannot actually figure out how to make something like that stop because technically the perp isn't in their jurisdiction and likely will never face time. The best we'll get right now until the laws catch up with the technology is if people like Mr. Costolo man up, realize that this is a problem, and work to fix it.
Ironbite-otherwise shit will go down hill for these companies.