LESLIE JONES’S TWITTER ABUSE PROVES RELYING ON USERS TO REPORT BULLIES ISN’T ENOUGH

Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been permanently banned from Twitter for breaking its rules against ‘participating in or inciting targeted abuse of individuals’, after he was said to have fanned the flames of sickening abuse directed at Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.

Jones quit the platform after a torrent of tweets, from messages comparing her to apes and videos of people screaming racist epithets, to people sending her images of her face covered in semen. On Tuesday evening, she wrote: ‘I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today . . . wrong’.

She hasn’t tweeted since.

In response, Yiannopoulos told Breitbart: ‘With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives. This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.’

Of course, this is nonsense. Freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to abuse or incite racial hatred. And in such tantrums about the right to offend – tantamount to a bully throwing his toys out of the pram – we hear nothing about the silenced free speech of those who, like Jones, are driven off social media platforms because the sheer level of vitriol is just too much to bear.

If Twitter takes effective action against racist and misogynistic bullies, this has the potential to be the beginning, not the end. The beginning of the platform as a space that is open to all to express and debate views, instead of a hate-filled pit where members of minority groups are threatened, abused and taunted.

But banning one high-profile user is nowhere near enough to achieve that reality. The abuse being hurled at Jones has starkly highlighted the fact that despite years of paying lip service to the problem, Twitter and other social media platforms have utterly failed their users over tackling abuse.

On Monday night, Twitter released a statement: ‘This type of abusive behavior is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others. We rely on people to report this type of behavior to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse. We realize we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.’

But what became very clear in Jones’s case was that relying on people to report this type of behaviour is completely inadequate in cases where a storm of co-ordinated abuse has been stirred up and deliberately incited against an individual. This is a scenario many women, and in particular women of colour, disabled people and members of the LGBTQIA community will recognize only too well.

These incidents of co-ordinated abuse are often instigated by influential users with thousands of followers, or even planned on a separate website or forum, where the victim is singled out as a target in advance. In these cases, it should be possible for a user simply to report the situation to Twitter. Moderators should monitor the situation and tackle the abusers as a group. There should be no need for the victim to trawl through and report accounts individually. Moderators could easily review each tweet using a particular user’s handle over the past twenty-four hours.

This wouldn’t require any alteration of Twitter’s community guidelines on what is and isn’t acceptable, simply more proactive implementation. This more victim-centred approach seems so mind-blowingly obvious that the fact it doesn’t seem to have been tried before makes Twitter’s claim to be working hard on this issue hard to swallow.

As Ijeoma Oluo points out, the impact of this problem reaches way beyond social media. By effectively denying women of colour access to these spaces, it not only removes their freedom of speech, but also access to vital professional networks, visibility, fan interaction and promotion of their work.

The abuse against Jones comes in the same week that Facebook’s global head of safety admitted the platform is failing to meet its own standards on dealing with rape threats and abuse. And just last year, Twitter’s chief executive acknowledged that the company ‘sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years’. Against this backdrop, with companies openly conceding that they are failing to protect users, the idea that it’s really bullies such as Yiannopoulos who are being persecuted is laughable.

He claims that his banning signals the end of Twitter, but what might actually bring the platform down is its ongoing failure to tackle online bullying. The success of social media platforms relies entirely upon us, their users. If they can’t take measurable, decisive action to tackle the kind of sickening abuse Jones and others receive, they no longer deserve our membership or support.

Originally published 21 July 2016