A Possible Solution To Twitter's Difficult Problem Of Abusive Behavior: Let People Speak, Don't Force Everyone To Listen

from the provide-tools dept

BuzzFeed had a long and interesting article earlier this week noting Twitter's ongoing difficulty in figuring out an appropriate way to deal with harassment and abuse that is often heaped upon certain users -- especially women and minorities. The article is interesting -- even as Twitter disputes some of its claims. It's also noteworthy that this debate is not even remotely new. Last year, I wrote about it, suggesting that one possible solution is to switch Twitter from being a platform into being a protocol -- on which anyone could then build services. In that world, Twitter could then offer various filters if it wanted -- while other providers could compete with different filters or services. Then the tweets could flow without Twitter having to take responsibility, but there would be options (possibly many options) for those who were dealing with abuse or harassment.

Not surprisingly, that kind of suggestion is unlikely to ever be adopted, but reading through the BuzzFeed article, something else struck me. To some extent, the article seemed a bit unfair in portraying some of Twitter's execs as willfully clueless about the abuse and harassment. It repeatedly portrays those who support freedom of expression as somehow being unreasonable extremists. Here's one example:

Weeks later, when a rash of beheading videos appeared, Costolo gave similar takedown orders, causing Twitter’s free speech advocates, Gabriel Stricker and Vijaya Gadde, to call an emergency policy meeting.

Inside the meeting, attended by Costolo, Stricker, Gadde, and product head Kevin Weil (now Instagram’s product lead) and first reported by BuzzFeed News, tensions rose as Costolo’s desire to build a more palatable network that was marketable and ultimately attractive to new users clashed with Stricker and Gadde’s desire for radically free expression.

“You really think we should have videos of people being murdered?” someone who attended the meeting recalls Costolo arguing, while Stricker reportedly compared Costolo’s takedown of undesirable content to deleting the Zapruder film after objections from the Kennedy family. Ultimately, the meeting ended with the group deciding to carve out policy exceptions to keep up grisly content for newsworthiness, according to one person present. Though Stricker and Gadde won, one source described a frustrated Costolo leaving in disagreement. “I think if you guys have your way the only people using Twitter will be ISIS and the ACLU,” Costolo said, according to this person.

But I think part of the issue is that people are confusing the nature of free speech, a la the famed xkcd on the issue: However, rather than the way most people take this xkcd to mean that it's right for sites to kick off people, I'd argue that it's something that Twitter itself should be thinking about. To date, much of its plans to deal with abuse seem to be focused on kicking people off the site who abuse the site's terms of service. This has created a few flare ups here and there of people who feel this is improper or unfair -- and that the process is arbitrary. But some of that may stem from the fact that people at Twitter are just as confused about the point of the xkcd above as many of its users are.

That is, I think the "free speech wing" of Twitter is absolutely correct that the site should bend over backwards to support the right and ability of people to say pretty much whatever they want to say. But what they don't need to do is force others to listen. That is Twitter should be focused, heavily, on building much, much, much, much more flexible and robust tools for users to curate their own experience. If they want to let in everything, they should be able to do so. If they want to want to block certain types of users, they should be able to do so. If they want to block based on keywords, they should be able to do so.

To date, Twitter has mostly offered fairly crude and mostly ineffective tools for users who are trying to deal with harassment. There is the ability to report abuse, but that leads to all sorts of problems and arbitrary decisions about who is violating the terms of service and who is not. The other two tools are the ability to "block" certain users and to "mute" others. There's a subtle difference here: if you block someone, they can discover that (and that leads to its own set of problems). If you "mute" them, they can still read your tweets, you just won't see theirs. People have created "blocklists," but again, these tend to be pretty crude and ineffective.

Giving end users not just a full suite of tools to figure out how they get to curate their own experience -- combined with the ability to share the "recipes" one creates -- could actually be super powerful. So, for example, say I don't want to view tweets from users who have had accounts for less than 6 months (a lot of abuse comes from new users) or who haven't actually uploaded an account profile image (so called "eggs"). Let me create that as an option -- and then share that "filter" or "recipe" for others to use. So, someone could create a filter/recipe that only shows notifications from users who have more than 1,000 followers and who have tweeted at least twice per week over the last year. Or, maybe a filter that automatically blocks anyone a particular politician has retweeted. The possibilities go on and on.

To some extent, this opens something of an opportunity to go back to the way that Twitter felt in the early days. Somewhat hilariously (in retrospect), in the early days, some claimed that one of the reasons why Twitter was so awesome was that there was "no spam or trolls" because you self-selected everyone you followed. It was a pure curation system. But that was only really true of the earliest incarnation of Twitter, before it incorporated replies, notifications and retweets. With those three things, your own curation skills only accounted for part of what you could be exposed to on Twitter. There became lots of ways for third parties to insert themselves into the conversation. And, to some extent, this is actually really great. I've met some fantastic people and learned a lot thanks to Twitter's ability to connect people. But it also opened the door to trolls and harassment and Twitter's just had so much difficulty figuring out what to do about it.

I get that there are two very large (and almost diametrically opposed) camps of people on Twitter who think that Twitter should either do nothing (Camp 1) ... or that they should be kicking a lot more people off the service (Camp 2). I think neither of those camps is being reasonable. For the first camp, ignoring the fact that harassment and spam and other stuff happens is silly. If you have a 100% open system, it gets abused, period. It's a mess. But camp 2 underestimates the subjective nature of what "harassment" is and the importance of being able to make use of a platform like Twitter. In other contexts, we've seen how arbitrary policies have resulted in questionable removals from sites, and that creates some serious problems.

Recognizing that Twitter is unlikely to ever move to my original solution, of offering a protocol rather than a platform, it seems that giving the power to each user to better curate and filter their own experience seems like a much more workable idea. In fact, it could help bring about the early Twitter experience, when users really did curate their entire experience. And, contrary to the concerns some supposedly expressed and which were repeated in the BuzzFeed article, it would seem to create a situation that might increase user adoption of the platform, rather than decrease it.

Filed Under: abuse, blocklists, filters, harassment, moderation, platforms, protocols
Companies: twitter

Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech

from the protocols-not-platforms dept

Right. By now you've heard about Reddit's new content moderation policy, which (in short) is basically that it will continue to ban illegal stuff, and then work hard to make "unpleasant" stuff harder to find. There is an awful lot of devil in very few details, mainly around the rather vague "I know it when I see it" standards being applied. So far, I've seen two kinds of general reactions, neither of which really make that much sense to me. You have the free speech absolutists who (incorrectly) think that a right to free speech should mean a right to bother others with their free speech. They're upset about any kind of moderation at all (though, apparently at least some are relieved that racist content won't be hidden entirely). On the flip side, there's lots and lots and lots of moralizing about how Reddit should just outright ban "bad" content.

I think both points of view are a little simplistic. It's easy to say that you "know" bad content when you see it, but then you end up in crazy lawsuits like the one we just discussed up in Canada, where deciding what's good and what's bad seems to be very, very subjective.

I'm a big supporter of free speech, period. No "but." I also worry about what it means for freedom of expression when everyone has to rely on intermediaries to "allow" that expression to occur. At the same time, I recognize that platforms have their own free speech rights to moderate what content appears on that platform. And also that having no moderation at all often leads to platforms being overrun and becoming useless -- starting with spam and, if a platform gets large enough, trollish behavior or other immature behavior that drives away more intelligent and inspired debate. This is different than arguing that certain content shouldn't be spoken or shouldn't be allowed to be spoken -- it's just that maybe it does not belong in a particular community. Obligatory xkcd: So Reddit is free to do what it wants, and Reddit's users are free to do what they want in response, It's a grand experiment in learning what everyone values in the long run. People will write about it for years.

However, in thinking about all of this (and the similar struggles that Twitter, in particular, has been having), I've been wondering if perhaps the problem is when we put the burden of "protecting free speech" on platforms, when that's not the best role for those platforms. The various platforms serve a variety of different purposes, all of which seem to get conflated into one larger purpose. They are places to post content (express), for one, but also a place to connect as well as a place for discoverability of the content.

And if we're serious about protecting free expression, perhaps those things should be separated. Here's a thought experiment that is only half baked (and I'm hoping many of you help continue the baking in the comments below). What if, instead of being full stack platforms for all of those things, they were split into a protocol for the expression, which was open and distributed, and then the company could continue to play the other roles of connecting and helping with discoverability. This isn't necessarily an entirely crazy idea. Ryan Charles, who worked at Reddit for a period of time, notes that he was hired to build such a thing, and is apparently trying to do so again outside of the company. And plenty of people have discussed building a distributed Twitter for years.

But here's the big question. In such a scenario is there still room for Reddit or Twitter the company, if they no longer host the content themselves? I'd argue yes and, in fact, that it could strengthen the business models for both, though while opening them up to more competition (which would be a challenge).

Think of it this way: if they were designed as protocols, where you could publish the content wherever you want -- including on platforms that you, yourself, control, then people would be free to speak their mind as they see fit using these tools. And that's great. But, then, the companies would just act as more centralized sources to curate and connect -- and it could be done in different ways by different companies. Think of it like HTTP and Google. Via HTTP anyone can publish whatever they want on the web, and Google then acts to make it findable via search.

In this world that we talk about, anyone could publish links or content via an Open Reddit Post Protocol (ORPP) or Open Tweet Protocol (OTP) and that includes the ability to push that content to the Corporate Reddit or the Corporate Twitter (or any other competitors that spring up). And then the platform companies can decide how they want to handle things. If they want a nice pure and clean Reddit where only good stuff and happy discussions occur, they can create that. Those who want angry political debates can set up their own platform that will accept that kind of content. In short, the content can still be expressed, but individuals effectively get to choose whose filtering and discoverability system they prefer. If a site becomes too aggressive, or not aggressive enough, then people can migrate as necessary.

This isn't necessarily a perfect solution by any means. And I'm sure it raises lots of other problems and challenges. And the companies doing the filtering and the discoverability will still face all sorts of questions about how they want to make those choices. Are they looking to pretend that ignorant angry people don't exist in the world? Or are they looking to provide forums to teach angry ignorant people not to be so angry and ignorant? Or do they want to be a forum just for angry ignorant people that the rest of the internet would prefer to, as xkcd notes, show the door.

And, of course, this would eventually lead to more questions about intermediary liability. Already we see these fights where people blame Google for the content that Google finds, even when it's hosted on other sites. If this sort of model really took off and there were really successful companies handling the filtering/discoverability portions, it's not hard to predict lawsuits arguing that it should be illegal for companies to link to certain content. But that's a different kind of battle.

Either way, this seems like a potential scenario that doesn't end up with one of the two extremes of either "all content must be allowed on these platforms even if it's being overrun by trolls and spam" or "we only let nice people talk around here." Because neither is a world that is particularly fun to think about.

Filed Under: communities, free speech, moderation, platforms, protocols
Companies: reddit, twitter