Officially, Twitter has strong rules against abuse and hate speech on its platform, yet nothing much seems to happen once abuse has been reported. The attacks continue, and victims are silenced. This has been a source of frustration not just for Twitter users but even for the company’s senior staff. In an internal memo in 2015 that was leaked, then Twitter CEO Dick Costolo not only admitted that Twitter “sucks” at dealing with abuse and trolls but also that the platform has “sucked at it for years”.
Three years later, nothing much has changed. In March, Amnesty International released a report titled ‘Toxic Twitter’. Based on research conducted over a 16-month period, it concluded that Twitter was failing in its responsibility to protect “women of colour, women from ethnic or religious minorities, lesbian, bisexual or transgender women — as well as non-binary individuals — and women with disabilities” from online violence and abuse.
This month, Amnesty released another study which found that black women were 84% more likely than white women to be the target of an abusive or problematic tweet. The study, based on crowd-sourced research from over 6,500 volunteers in 150 countries, constitutes data-based evidence of the lack of effective deterrence on Twitter against abuse of vulnerable groups in general and women in particular.
As if to buttress these findings, in its latest Transparency Report, covering January to June 2018, Twitter revealed that around 6.2 million ‘unique’ accounts were reported for possible violations of its rules. Of these, 2.8 million were reported for abuse, nearly 2.7 million for hate speech, and about 1.3 million for violent threats. These are mind-boggling numbers. Twitter claims to have acted against 250,000 accounts for abuse, 285,000 for hate speech, and nearly 43,000 for violent threats. These numbers — in the low hundreds of thousands — are a fraction of the millions that it says were reported. Does this then mean that most of the complaints of abuse, hate speech and threats were false? Twitter offers no credible explanation for the enormous gap between the number of reported accounts and the number of accounts against which action was taken. Does the discrepancy between the two point to an explanation as to why abusive trolls continue to have a field day on Twitter?
The most charitable view is that Twitter has good intentions but is genuinely clueless. If that is indeed the case, it should heed Amnesty’s recommendation to share with the public the raw data on its content moderation and rule enforcement processes, so that users can see for themselves the chain of actions, if any, set off by their complaints. That is the least it can do to reassure the public that their complaints are taken seriously, and that the platform is doing its best to offer a safe space for women and vulnerable groups.
The writer is the Social Affairs Editor of The Hindu
