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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/26/taylor-swift-protection-troll-instagram-abuse-twitter
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| Sure, Taylor Swift deserves protection from trolls. But don’t we all? | Sure, Taylor Swift deserves protection from trolls. But don’t we all? |
| (30 days later) | |
| In the battle against online harassment, a few bits of conventional wisdom have held (bafflingly) for at least a decade: “This is just what the internet’s like!” “If you don’t like the internet, stay off the internet!” “Can’t make an internet without getting a little internet on your internet!” | In the battle against online harassment, a few bits of conventional wisdom have held (bafflingly) for at least a decade: “This is just what the internet’s like!” “If you don’t like the internet, stay off the internet!” “Can’t make an internet without getting a little internet on your internet!” |
| Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the internet – a thing that we built, and populate with our own brains and labour – is immutable, inert and utterly beyond our influence. Fight back and we’re “feeding the trolls”. Ban harassers and we’re “afraid of debate”. Report death threats and we’re “censoring free speech”. Speak out about our experiences and we’re “professional victims”. | Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the internet – a thing that we built, and populate with our own brains and labour – is immutable, inert and utterly beyond our influence. Fight back and we’re “feeding the trolls”. Ban harassers and we’re “afraid of debate”. Report death threats and we’re “censoring free speech”. Speak out about our experiences and we’re “professional victims”. |
| Tech companies “try” to curb harassment, but somehow can’t preemptively stop heavily documented abusers from sending hundreds of thousands of acolytes to hurl racist, misogynist abuse at unsuspecting Ghostbusters. The overwhelming message is this: your safety is not a priority – your choices are to suffer or to leave. | Tech companies “try” to curb harassment, but somehow can’t preemptively stop heavily documented abusers from sending hundreds of thousands of acolytes to hurl racist, misogynist abuse at unsuspecting Ghostbusters. The overwhelming message is this: your safety is not a priority – your choices are to suffer or to leave. |
| Unless, maybe, you’re Taylor Swift. | Unless, maybe, you’re Taylor Swift. |
| Beneath the rather histrionic headline “Is Taylor censoring social media?” (answer: no) and even more absurd subhead “The singer has been accused of working directly with both Twitter and Instagram” (the horror!), the Sun speculated on Monday that Swift has been given access to a secret algorithm to scrub her social media accounts of abusive comments. | Beneath the rather histrionic headline “Is Taylor censoring social media?” (answer: no) and even more absurd subhead “The singer has been accused of working directly with both Twitter and Instagram” (the horror!), the Sun speculated on Monday that Swift has been given access to a secret algorithm to scrub her social media accounts of abusive comments. |
| “A number of high-profile accounts have been selected by [Instagram] to trial a new tool which prevents abusive comments,” the paper reported. | “A number of high-profile accounts have been selected by [Instagram] to trial a new tool which prevents abusive comments,” the paper reported. |
| Which ... sure, yes, great. Human being to human being, I believe that Swift deserves to be able to maintain an online presence free from unrelenting, violent, misogynist abuse. I oppose violence. I oppose harassment. (A deluge of snake emojis in defence of Kanye West is not precisely the kind of harassment I’m talking about, but Taylor gets plenty of the hard stuff, too.) I think social media platforms should reach out to and work directly with victims of harassment, and I’m glad to hear that Instagram is experimenting with ways to better protect its users. However, this conversation should not have started with Swift, and it absolutely cannot end with her. Protecting only the most high-profile users isn’t a fix; it’s a sham. It’s a veneer over a rotten tooth. | Which ... sure, yes, great. Human being to human being, I believe that Swift deserves to be able to maintain an online presence free from unrelenting, violent, misogynist abuse. I oppose violence. I oppose harassment. (A deluge of snake emojis in defence of Kanye West is not precisely the kind of harassment I’m talking about, but Taylor gets plenty of the hard stuff, too.) I think social media platforms should reach out to and work directly with victims of harassment, and I’m glad to hear that Instagram is experimenting with ways to better protect its users. However, this conversation should not have started with Swift, and it absolutely cannot end with her. Protecting only the most high-profile users isn’t a fix; it’s a sham. It’s a veneer over a rotten tooth. |
| Taylor Swift has the money to buffer herself from online hate. Trans women, black women and sex workers do not | Taylor Swift has the money to buffer herself from online hate. Trans women, black women and sex workers do not |
| I had my own tiny Swift moment once. In December 2014 – after grappling with and writing about online abuse for years – I got on the phone with an internet troll who had impersonated my recently deceased father. He said he targeted women, especially women like me who had stepped beyond their culturally prescribed roles. It was fascinating. Anonymity is foundational to internet trolling – if not the blueprint, it’s certainly the mortar – so such a candid conversation was rare and riveting. | I had my own tiny Swift moment once. In December 2014 – after grappling with and writing about online abuse for years – I got on the phone with an internet troll who had impersonated my recently deceased father. He said he targeted women, especially women like me who had stepped beyond their culturally prescribed roles. It was fascinating. Anonymity is foundational to internet trolling – if not the blueprint, it’s certainly the mortar – so such a candid conversation was rare and riveting. |
| In January 2015, we broadcast the interview on a US radio programme called This American Life. It’s a compelling piece of tape (thanks, in no small part, to the almost superhuman perspicacity of my remorseful troll), and it threw a key aspect of online harassment into harsh relief: trolling cannot be separated from politics. People, mostly men, are inflicting emotional torture on other people, mostly from marginalised communities, for the twin purposes of massaging the trolls’ insecurities and silencing their perceived political foes, defending the precious status quo. But, “you can’t claim to be OK with women,” my troll told me, “and then go online and insult them, seek them out to harm them emotionally.” | In January 2015, we broadcast the interview on a US radio programme called This American Life. It’s a compelling piece of tape (thanks, in no small part, to the almost superhuman perspicacity of my remorseful troll), and it threw a key aspect of online harassment into harsh relief: trolling cannot be separated from politics. People, mostly men, are inflicting emotional torture on other people, mostly from marginalised communities, for the twin purposes of massaging the trolls’ insecurities and silencing their perceived political foes, defending the precious status quo. But, “you can’t claim to be OK with women,” my troll told me, “and then go online and insult them, seek them out to harm them emotionally.” |
| (If you don’t believe that online harassment is a political issue, and that ignoring it makes the world worse, scan the accounts tweeting in support of recently banned professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos, and note how many of them rabidly back aspiring troll-in-chief Donald Trump.) | (If you don’t believe that online harassment is a political issue, and that ignoring it makes the world worse, scan the accounts tweeting in support of recently banned professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos, and note how many of them rabidly back aspiring troll-in-chief Donald Trump.) |
| A few weeks later, in February 2015, someone at Twitter leaked a memo from then-CEO Dick Costolo. My piece had been posted to an internal forum, causing Costolo to respond: “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” He went on: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.” | A few weeks later, in February 2015, someone at Twitter leaked a memo from then-CEO Dick Costolo. My piece had been posted to an internal forum, causing Costolo to respond: “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” He went on: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.” |
| And then, abruptly, my experience on Twitter changed. When I reported an abusive tweet, I got a response immediately. Far more of my reports were accepted, as though they had been thoughtfully screened and contextualised by a human rather than summarily dismissed by an algorithm. Trolls who had been gleefully abusing me for months suddenly vanished. I’ve never had this confirmed, but I can only assume that, following Costolo’s internal memo, a Twitter employee was assigned to monitor my account. I was the squeaky wheel of the moment, and I was grateful for the grease. | And then, abruptly, my experience on Twitter changed. When I reported an abusive tweet, I got a response immediately. Far more of my reports were accepted, as though they had been thoughtfully screened and contextualised by a human rather than summarily dismissed by an algorithm. Trolls who had been gleefully abusing me for months suddenly vanished. I’ve never had this confirmed, but I can only assume that, following Costolo’s internal memo, a Twitter employee was assigned to monitor my account. I was the squeaky wheel of the moment, and I was grateful for the grease. |
| But, much like giving Swift tools to clean up her feeds, Twitter’s momentary focus on me didn’t fix a thing – any more than a successful GoFundMe campaign fixes a broken healthcare system, or one person winning the lottery fixes the economy. If anything, it bolstered the erroneous perception that Twitter harassment is a white woman’s problem, and making loud white women temporarily happy is a solution. (I sincerely hope that Instagram is planning to roll out this feature, or one like it, to the masses who need it the most, and I will praise it when I see it functionally protecting vulnerable users.) | But, much like giving Swift tools to clean up her feeds, Twitter’s momentary focus on me didn’t fix a thing – any more than a successful GoFundMe campaign fixes a broken healthcare system, or one person winning the lottery fixes the economy. If anything, it bolstered the erroneous perception that Twitter harassment is a white woman’s problem, and making loud white women temporarily happy is a solution. (I sincerely hope that Instagram is planning to roll out this feature, or one like it, to the masses who need it the most, and I will praise it when I see it functionally protecting vulnerable users.) |
| I don’t care about online harassment because I, personally, was being harassed – I care about it because it is toxic, dangerous and regressive. By targeting the vulnerable, it silences the voices we need to hear the most. What I deal with online is nothing compared with the experiences of trans women, black women, sex workers and other marginalised groups. Swift has the money to hire a team of assistants to buffer her from online hate. I have a platform to complain, as well as the cladding of credibility granted by that platform. The vast majority of harassment victims do not. As is the function of privilege, those with the most resources seem to get the most – and the quickest – help. | I don’t care about online harassment because I, personally, was being harassed – I care about it because it is toxic, dangerous and regressive. By targeting the vulnerable, it silences the voices we need to hear the most. What I deal with online is nothing compared with the experiences of trans women, black women, sex workers and other marginalised groups. Swift has the money to hire a team of assistants to buffer her from online hate. I have a platform to complain, as well as the cladding of credibility granted by that platform. The vast majority of harassment victims do not. As is the function of privilege, those with the most resources seem to get the most – and the quickest – help. |
| As Leigh Alexander elegantly wrote of Yiannopoulos’s ousting from Twitter and its aftermath: “But what about the everyday users, who aren’t famous and highly visible actors? What about the black activists, particularly black women, whose every day on the service is a minefield? What about LGBTQ users who face the very real threat of having the dialogue around their identity wrestled away by abusers? They have not been made safer in any way by the removal of one toxic person.” | As Leigh Alexander elegantly wrote of Yiannopoulos’s ousting from Twitter and its aftermath: “But what about the everyday users, who aren’t famous and highly visible actors? What about the black activists, particularly black women, whose every day on the service is a minefield? What about LGBTQ users who face the very real threat of having the dialogue around their identity wrestled away by abusers? They have not been made safer in any way by the removal of one toxic person.” |
| It’s important to remember that, although we frame it as a tech problem, online harassment is fundamentally a culture problem. What we need isn’t a plaster, a way to temporarily shuffle abusers out of our line of vision, but to banish misogyny, racism, ableism and transphobia from our brains, our culture and our justice systems. And, yes, that’s a long game, but we’ll never get there if we keep letting the experts – the people who live and survive under those oppressive systems – be silenced. The best thing the tech industry can do is start protecting them so that the rest of the world can listen. | It’s important to remember that, although we frame it as a tech problem, online harassment is fundamentally a culture problem. What we need isn’t a plaster, a way to temporarily shuffle abusers out of our line of vision, but to banish misogyny, racism, ableism and transphobia from our brains, our culture and our justice systems. And, yes, that’s a long game, but we’ll never get there if we keep letting the experts – the people who live and survive under those oppressive systems – be silenced. The best thing the tech industry can do is start protecting them so that the rest of the world can listen. |