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Twitter Runs a Test Prompting Users To Revise 'Harmful' Replies (techcrunch.com) 90

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
In its latest effort to deal with rampant harassment on its platform, Twitter will look into giving users a second chance before they tweet. From a report: In a new feature the company is testing, users who use "harmful" language will see a prompt suggesting that they self-edit before posting a reply. The framing here is a bit disingenuous -- harassment on Twitter certainly doesn't just happen in the "heat of the moment" by otherwise well-meaning individuals -- but anything that can reduce toxicity on the platform is probably better than what we've got now.
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Twitter Runs a Test Prompting Users To Revise 'Harmful' Replies More

Twitter Runs a Test Prompting Users To Revise 'Harmful' Replies

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  • Obligatory XKCD [slashdot.org]. Who knows, maybe it'll at least flush out the Russian trolls.

  • The End Goal is Enforced TDS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:45AM (#60027192)
    If they thought could get away with it, the social tech giants would just make their policy the same as the crazy knitting forum:

    https://www.ravelry.com/conten... [ravelry.com]

    New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration

    The goal is simply to get as close to that policy as possible through ever broader and vaguer (and selectively-enforced) TOS language and obstructionism like this. It'll get much worse the closer we get to the election (like it already has).

    • Re:The End Goal is Enforced TDS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @02:02AM (#60027214) Homepage

      Here is a three-part series on the SJW insanity in, of all places, knitting. Yes, that's right, the same things that happened on our universities also happened in this small community of people that mostly communicate online. A sobering story, worthy of a few minutes of your time.

      Part 1: A Witch-Hunt on Instagram [quillette.com]. "Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women's tears, maybe do some reflection on how your equation of India with an alien world reinforces an "other" mindset that is at the core of imperialism and colonialism."

      Part 2: Instagram's Diversity Wars Revisited [quillette.com]. "My article described how a blogger and online craft store owner was denounced for writing an innocuous blog about her forthcoming trip to India, and how the yarn dyer Maria Tusken was then harassed and accused of complicity in racism for objecting to the mobbing. Businesses were chastised for their failure to be "truly inclusive" or for apologising too late when they had put a foot wrong. Since my article appeared, things have only got worse."

      Part 3: Knitting's Infinity War, Part III: Showdown at Yarningham [quillette.com]. "The least that can be said in defense of the Ravelry policy is that Trump is a public figure, who probably will not be much put out by an editorial policy on a knitting site. What was far more unsettling was what happened two weeks later, when knitters who claim to be champions of social justice went after a gay man within the community because he'd written a satirical poem suggesting (correctly) that all the recent anti-racism mobbings might be having a toxic effect on the community."

      • Did the community use gay in a derogatory manner or bring up his sexuality when addressing the poem? If not, then it's you who has the problem, adding that he's gay when it's irrelevant to the situation - they would have roasted a straight author of an identical poem

        • Take a look yourself and see if there was any reason to attack a gay man with AIDS. Here's what he wrote:

          With genuine SOLEM-KNITTY
           I beg you, stop the
           Enmity
           Don't use the word
           DIVERSKNITTY,
           To mask your
           ANIMOS-KNITTY.
           Stop bullying
           FEROC-KNITTY
          And insta-
           ANONYM-KNITTY
           And self-imposed
           IMPU-KNITTY
           Is breaking our COMMU-KNITTY

          Taylor followed up his poem with a (since deleted) post:

          "One year on almost to the day, since I sent out the first ever post to use the #diversknitty hashtag - a word I

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Rule #1 Never apologise.
        Rule #2 Never explain.
        Rule #3 Don't delete the original comment - you are removing the evidence that the comment was mild and inoffensive - and the only thing left is the deranged claims about it.

      • That all sounds like bog standard church gossip stuff that predates the internet.

        Now it's something grown ass men spend their free time bitching about because... and I honestly can't fathom why.

        Dude why are you so fixated on this "sjw" stuff? Like putting a magnifying glass on what someone said about some gay man's satirical poem on a knitting site? Do you ever like step back and think about it a minute? I mean I'll take your word for it, but I'm about as interested in reading more about that as the next

        • Why is it you are taking the SJW side, attempting to justify their repugnant actions by saying that they don't matter? What the hell? They matter deeply. They destroyed Marvel and DC comics, by telling their customers to fuck off. You know the comic they just created with the new superheroes Safespace and Snowflake? Culture matters. Their entitlement knows no bounds and cannot be sated. They're fragile and overreact ridiculously to the slightest provocation, real or imagined. Their suspicion and pres

          • Comics are for children.

            If you have an issue with what they portray, take it up with the Comics Code Authority.

            Your entitlement knows no bounds and cannot be sated. You're fragile and overreact ridiculously to the slightest provocation, real or imagined.Your suspicion and presumption of bad faith and ill-will are implacable.

            • Is this account some kind of ridiculous right-wing parody of what they imagine SJWs are like? "Comics are for children"? On a nerd website?

              Or are you serious?

              • I'm serious as a hand grenade. I'm a nerd and I was also a huge fan of comic books. When I was fucking ten. Grow the fuck up.

                • "Comics are for children"? Seriously? Did you ever hear about Frank Miller's Dark Knight in 1989? How about Maus?

                  You're nothing but a disgusting bully who uses attempted shaming to intimidate his victims into submission.

                  • And you're a piece-of-fuck man child who can eat my shit and hair.

                    • You, sir, are sick with the same disease you accuse your opponents of having. A strong case can be made that they caught it from you.
                  • it looks like the monkey you answered never heard of something called "manga" (Japanese comics), many of which are definitely not for children.

      • The market finds solutions to market problems.

    • ... his embrace of 'nationalism' is a dog-whistled love-note to white nationalists.

      From the 'parent' web-page:
      https://forum.rpg.net/index.ph... [rpg.net]

      • How amusing to see someone thank the source of the cancer that metastasized to them.

        Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work.

        * thought policework

    • No way! On a knitting www page? Oh my gosh!

      Guys this is so serious, if we can't talk about politics on a knitting www, where can we? Internet abuse! Internet abuse!

      • Guys this is so serious, if we can't talk about politics on a knitting www, where can we?

        I disagree. An evenly-enforced politics ban almost certainly would have gone over far better than the activist, partisan policy they ended up with (no matter which side it came from).

  • Twiter's problem is not mean tweets (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:45AM (#60027194)
    It's public shaming and the associated behavior of systematically destroying people's lives over stupid offhand comments.
    I have no idea why people use that website; you piss off one blue checkmark and suddenly you have 100 people calling your workplace demanding you get fired.

    • Re: Twiter's problem is not mean tweets (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cylix ( 55374 ) on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:50AM (#60027204) Homepage Journal

      The only way to win the war is to deny the battle.

    • Easily solved; ban employers from firing people for spurious reasons. Oh, wait, we already have that...

    • Twitter's problem is almost half of its userbase is made up of primates, who don't appreciate that they ARE primates. Who've never heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and who engage in flame wars without understanding what drives that kind of behavior.

      Worse, the rest are bots inciting those fights.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Twitter's problem is that THEY and everyone else forgot what Twitter was.

      It's a toilet wall full of bullshit graffiti that doesn't matter - and you should never, ever put personal information there and certainly never verify anyone - and in fact, discourage such a practice. That was the first wrong step.

      Once they fully bought into the trust and safety and got social justice warrior in their staff... it was only a matter of time.

      Now Twitter is the judge, jury and executioner of what is an is not correct and/

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      It's public shaming and the associated behavior of systematically destroying people's lives over stupid offhand comments.

      Most people think of Twitter as a patio chat with friends. It is not. It is more like being called for a surprise meeting with your boss and finding HR sitting there with him/her.

      Twitter is a website designed to randomly destroy people's lives. It isn't just random online mob dragging, it is also other people digital dumpster diving to come up with dirt on you. The dirt you foolishly put in there yourself.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rho ( 6063 )

      Twitter's problem is people on Twitter think Twitter is real life.

  • Twitter has a long history of maintaining a double standard: one for the commoners (that's you) and one for bluechecks (basically elites). The bluechecks can say the meanest things, perform damaging acts offline that result in real harm to real people, and Twitter shrugs. As long as they support the power structure, they're in no danger.

    I remember on my first exposure to Twitter, I didn't really realize what link I had clicked on. I saw some person frothing at the mouth and ranting at something. I mea

    • Twitter and its staff fully endorse and support everything the Bluechecks say, and what they say is a reflection of Twitter's beliefs. If a bluecheck says that pedophilia is acceptable and that Obama is a coon, then Twitter staff as a whole are pedo-defending racists. 10 men and a nazi at the table makes 11 nazis and all that.

      This precedent was set when Milo Yiannopolis lost his checkmark for being an ass. From that moment on, "verified" became "endorsed user".

    • Twitter has a long history of maintaining a double standard: one for the commoners (that's you) and one for bluechecks (basically elites). The bluechecks can say the meanest things, perform damaging acts offline that result in real harm to real people, and Twitter shrugs. As long as they support the power structure, they're in no danger.

      One of my biggest complaints about left leaning thinking is that it's horribly inconsistent. There are rules of thumb but no solid principles which is why so many contradictions exist. At core it hasn't been thought through. This probably happened because feelings, which have no consistent basis, were elevated above reasoning. So you get these general ideas - white is bad, oppressed is good, religion bad, environmentalism good, men bad, women good, etc. However nothing concrete exists to ground all of

  • Putting silly bandaids on it won't help anything. Even if Twitter were some joyous place of kindness and rainbows it would still have little redeeming social value.

    The only reasons I read anything there is I unknowingly clicked on a "news" article which is really just a copy/paste of random nobodies on twitter (usually a UK site but not always), and I sometimes see what Trump is up to because it impacts the stock market.

    Twitter is a cesspool of vile stupidity and has no redeeming value. Just shut it down.

  • I have a better solution that's been working for a long time now: unfollow+block.

    Let's face it: people who get "harmful" tweets are looking for them, at least in 99% of the cases. It's perfectly possible to have a clean timeline.

  • Yeah. That's gonna make a heap of a difference when you ask someone who is just about to reply to a heated discussion whether he really wants to insult the other party.

    If anything, this will be taken as a cue to edit the reply. If it does NOT appear, that is.

  • So for example... (Score:3)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @06:45AM (#60027650)

    So I might be deemed to be using "harmful language" if I referred to the probable Democratic and Republican candidates for President as "senile old rape monkeys"?

    Asking for a friend.

    • Sure, if you buy into everything you watch and read. While Trump has admitted to groping women and spying on under aged girls undressing for modelling, Biden has been sudden accused of things he did at places he was never at, on dates that he was verified as somewhere else.

      So you can take your stupid "both sides" offhand comment and shove it.

      We have one reasonable person running for President, and one completely insane sociopath. If you don't want to be a lib, that's fine, you still have a reasonable person

  • Twitter doesn't want to fix this (Score:3)

    by TheDarkMaster ( 1292526 ) on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @07:54AM (#60027782)
    What really makes Twitter a toxic place is how easy it is to create fake accounts and bots . You can block a toxic user, but the first thing he does is create a new account in less than thirty seconds to keep posting junk, and usually these users are criminals with a well-defined agenda (like spreading misinformation)

    And worse, the really harmful users are never banned, such as politicians inciting crimes or spreading lies about opponents.
  • Will it give me a chance to change my "harmful" language if I said Donald Trump was a Desperate Cheeto?

  • I'm not happy with their censorship (Score:5, Interesting)

    by waynemcdougall ( 631415 ) <slashdot@codeworks.gen.nz> on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @08:13AM (#60027822) Homepage

    A friend of mine tweeted that he had finally created a non-trivial regex without having to look up the manual.

    I tweeted back: "Congratulations. Now you can die happy."

    My account was blocked for threatening behaviour. No one complained. Due to time zone differences, I don't think even my friends saw my response.

    OK, so it's a bot. It doesn't want me to wish death on someone, even a happy one. I had the option to delete my tweet or appeal to a human for review. Being stubborn, I decided to appeal, even though my account was still blocked. Nothing of value lost, right?

    I explained the humour, the idiom, that this was my way of congratulating my friend, linked to examples of such usage, in my appeal to the human reviewer.

    The appeal was quick. Within the 72 hours. Denied. I either deleted my tweet or my account would be permanently deleted. And because of my failed appeal, any subsequent offence would result in my account being deleted. Without recourse.

    So my account could go at any time. Who knows what idiom will trigger a bot. So my use of twitter is curtailed. I can't express myself. If I have to watch every word, why bother?

    I think they are shooting themselves in the foot. Which I probably can't tweet any more.

    • I don't see why you abuse yourself by taking part in anything to do with their service, and I speak as a professional garment.

      • Twitter is so popular among the "media class" that you can't opt out. Even if you're just watching the news, there's gonna be fucking twitter content on it.

  • Will they finally shut Trump off?

  • There's nothing Trump can do to get banned.

  • >The framing here is a bit disingenuous -- harassment on Twitter certainly doesn't just happen in the "heat of the moment" by otherwise well-meaning individuals

    And framing of this statement is extremely disingenuous. Addressing a large problem is almost never about a single method, but multitude of methods each applying to small subsections of the problem each.

    This would appear to be a method targeting toxic replies made in a moment of passion, rather than all of the "harassment on twitter". And for that

  • Twitter is trying to put a band-aid on a sucking chest wound and trying to convince everyone it's all good.
    Ain't gonna work. Social media is cancerous, the cancer has spread too far and too wide to stop now; 'social media' is terminal and should be euthanized. Seriously, if you're still on Twitter, Facebook, or any other so-called 'social media', you should just implement your exit strategy now. It's not enhancing your life, it's just poisoning your mind. Delete your Twitter and Facebook accounts TODAY, an

  • Seriously. When did everyone become so domesticated that they can't handle someone saying things they dont like on the internet? Or in real life?

    When did life become a competition to see who can be the biggest complainer? The biggest weakling?

    Living in a world where you strive to be as helpless as possible, as thin skinned as possible. Where there always has to be an authority figure to protect you and take care of you. Where you drive around alone in a car with HEPA air filtration but put a mask on to show

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      In the US, the journey to this began when the government decided it had the power to reward and punish based upon perceived persecution. I point directly at the Civil Rights Act, and the American With Disabilities Act. Those two pieces of legislation gave special privileges to people that could declare themselves to be "oppressed", rightly or wrongly, People like special privileges, and (at least in America) gaming the system is an Olympic sport. Ipso facto, I may not know if I'm a boy or girl, but if yo

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