Twitter rolls out troll controls Rather than draining its swamp, Twitter aims to muffle the trolls that have taken up residence there. Openness is great, the company explained in a blog post, but people are taking advantage of it to insult others. "The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we've seen across the Internet has risen sharply over the past …
First its "trolls" and "hateful" then its anybody who didn't vote the right way..
Funny how dispot countries ban social media first to "stop decent and subversive"
Can't also help notice that bought and paid for "news" outlets have rapidly dwindling viewers/readers, that couldn't possibly have anything to do with..
They already ban non-abusive accounts with the wrong politics, but you can call for the assassination of a (specific) political candidate and face no consequences. Women are specially protected by Twitter, with the exception of Anne Coulter and the like. Celebrities get special treatment, like when Leslie Jones targeted her followers at another user and said "get her". She didn't get banned, but the target of her abuse is no longer on the site.
Craigness,
I worry about you. You clearly have a lot of pent up resentment against women and you (hopefully, but unlikely) only have the internet to vent your spleen about their womanliness. Do you (reliably) post anti-women tosh on here because you think there are so few around and they won't call you out on your misogynistic nonsense? I'm as unsurprised as someone can be that you miss Milo and his pretty blue tick.
The only special treatment women get on Twitter is sexist abuse and dick pics. How very dare these women be specially protected like that. How dare they breath and type and have views that differ to your own, and then complain when they get threats of rape by scissors or death that get ignored. Bloody self-centred harpies, wouldn't you agree?
Rob 44, there's a well-known idea called 'oppression does not go upward'. White people excluding black people from meetings is oppression because, in our society, whites have more power than blacks. When black people exclude whites from their own meetings, it is not oppression. It is a denial of a bit of white power. But whites scream and yell, as the diminution of power is outrageous to them. Tey yell 'oppression' but it is not.
Use any other two groups you want, as long as one is dominant and has all the power and the other is not and does not. Always the same. Oppression cannot go up the ladder; you can only stomp on someone's head in a downward direction.
One question. What does oppression have to do with women getting special treatment?
Are you trying to imply women in the western world (you know the most privileged group of women in history) are oppressed?
What's next? Are you going to tell me women are never violent and black people are never racist?
I stopped using twitter because of morons like you. Don't bring that crap here and ruin this site too.
Whatever I have to say on this topic, Randall Munroe sums it up nicely. As usual.
However, in re: the "snowflake" posts above, try this on for size: not being able to communicate in a reasonable, thoughtful, considerate fashion and instead resorting to epithets of hate and abuse does not make you edgy or cool, it just indicates your dire lack of social training. Your parents should have done better. I would say that it's most likely that the best part of you ran down the inside of your mother's leg, but that's exactly the sort of thing that you would say, so I won't.
@Throatwarbler Mangrove
not being able to communicate in a reasonable, thoughtful, considerate fashion and instead resorting to epithets of hate and abuse
Quite right! But holding differing views does not a hate speech make! And therein lays the problem, people tend to end up living in their own little filter bubbles / echo chambers
As a result they scream blue bloody murder anytime they encounter an idea that runs counter their ideology. Its not always about people calling you a twat.
you twat :)
"But holding differing views does not a hate speech make!"
I agree completely, and there's a marked difference in tone between the posts on The Register's forums versus, say, the fetid cesspool of the average, unmoderated general news site. In general, Trump supporters in the wild come off as a bunch of semi-literate mouthbreathers; the ones who post here, while still prone to behaving like pricks, are at least compelled to maintain a veneer of civility and can usually mostly sometimes express themselves in a reasonably coherent fashion. Which is why I choose to participate in these forums and not, say, Twitter.
FWIW, anecdotally speaking I've been pleasantly surprised to find I've been able to have extended exchange of views with people I have fundamental dsiagreements with - Trump / Brexit stuff -- wotj points / counter-points being put in a reasonably civilised manner, lately, on Twitter. Well, two or three times, anyway. It's good to remember that not everyone on the "other side" is either a libtard snowflake elitist or a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging racist.
(Personally I quite like being a snowflake, what with my six-way symmetry, crystalline structure and extremely unusual physical properties, but that's by-the-by.)
Are they really combating trolls or allowing businesses to remove tweets they don't want other customers or potential customers to see?
Are they avoiding the costs involved with employing staff to manage twitter?
Is twitter just another social media platform for people to shout look at me?
Could they have avoided all confusion at the start by substituting the first vowel in it's name?
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to tweet about it, does it matter?
>It was about this time that Pew Internet Research noted that 26 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 have been stalked online, and 25 per cent have been the target of online sexual harassment.
This would be the same research that found most abuse is suffered by men, right? And men fared worst in 4 of the 6 categories (you picked the other 2 for special mention).
Further to that, in my (thankfully) limited reading of twitter accounts and tweets therein, i find that it is the millenial females themselves who are dishing out the abuse.
Somewhat amusing last week to see those who often tweet the mantra "haters are gonna hate" were the ones going overboard over Trump's emphatic victory.
You're referring to the stats all for men and women regardless of age, the original comment is clearly referencing the statistics for men and women aged 18-24 where its 3 each but for those categories where men (18-24) come out ahead the difference is so borderline as to be within the margin of error, however for those two categories 'picked...for special mention' in the article the predominance of women (18-24) as victims in those categories was dramatic. 4 times more likely to have been stalked and 2 times more likely to have been sexually harassed. You might think that mentioning the standout statistics is somehow manipulating the story, but it seems to me that its just mentioning the standout statistics.
Twitter has problem with its basic design. It tends to be oriented towards loud-mouthed, vain, narcissists who by definition at best only obnoxious. The more obnoxious the more trollish the behavior. It is not a platform designed for something resembling a coherent post, 140 characters pretty much limit one to snark. A longer post allows one to express more subtlety, facts, and, hopefully, logic about a topic.
The problem with trying containing trolls is very basic. What is a troll? Outside of some very loutish people it is often in the eyes of the reader; particularly if the topic is controversial such as the recent US election. Too many define a troll as someone who disagrees with them or expresses an observation which may very accurate they wish to ignore.
"We're enabling you to mute [notifications for] keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations"
Mmmmm, how can we* abuse this fine new trolling feature? Poisoning the well, as it were. The Singularity is nigh! All twatterers will have their own heads stuck so far up their own twats that they collapse in upon themselves and vanish into the ether. And there will be much rejoicing!
*Not me, I don't touch filthy social media, but I identify as an ally of all those who stand against twattery.
On second that, I fear Twitter's demise would be the end of El Reg. Long live Twitter!
Mute Twitter altogether. The signal-to-noise ratio sucks. The same can be said of Facebook. They have become Anti-Social Media.
I have neither the time nor inclination to sift through mountains of crappy memes, f-ed up politics, Snopes-debunked alarmist posts, and (of course) ads for the occasional amusing nugget.
I love how people post on here their ire at social media.
Whatever, you don't have to join, but you do understand that having a handle and posting here is still a form of social media. Maybe it's the self righteous anti social media folks posting on social media about how they don't use social media who need to disappear up they're own arse?
"... but you do understand that having a handle and posting here is still a form of social media."
Yes, thank you, I am perfectly aware of this.
However, there is a range. Like with the printed press where you have actual newspapers at one end of the spectrum and rags like The Sun or The Daily at the other end.
"... you don't have to join ..."
Guess what? I am aware of this as well!
I do pick and choose the "social media" I join, just as I try to choose the persons I interact with socially in real life (not always possible or feasible, but that's real life for you). Thing is, I do not use Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp (to name just three), and yet they influence my daily life in various ways. And I do not like it.
Forums are not social media, except in the loosest sense.
Social media is for cultivating a public brand or persona.
Forums are for pure unfettered discourse.
El Reg, for one, is a little corner of the web where random strangers discuss/ridicule IT happenings in the news. It's not all-pervasive. It doesn't seek to dominate your communications. Nobody's smartphone goes d-d-ding every time someone replies to their drivel AFAIK. There are no user profiles to speak of. No bloody avatar photos. None of the grandstanding, self-promotion, and outright whoring that you see on proper social media, because it simply doesn't work here.
Trolls have been around the internet for decades. Anyone ever pop into some of the spicer alt. groups on Usenet? Maybe even participate in a "Raid" by one group on another? Moments of hilarity often ensued. Difference there was the media was not really treating usenet as a news source in itself.
Trolling IS a form of free speech. There are limits to free speech (slander and libel) even in 'murica but so long as avoid those "out of bounds" areas, trolls should be "weapons free".
if your only response to a troll is to attempt to remove their voice because you cannot figure out how to ignore or fire back, my suggestion would be to get up from the computer, turn off the cell phone, and go outside for a while. There is still a real world out there.
Y U Mad bro?
Snuh
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