By Daley Wilhelm The Internet is a wonderful, terrible and powerful thing. It’s a tool, and like all tools, it can be fashioned into a weapon quite easily. Cyberbullying has and probably always will happen, especially under the ambiguous ways various harassment laws address it. In some cases, provisions for cyberbullying don't exist at all. Twitter has often been criticized for allowing a toxic environment where rape threats are the norm on their platform. In 2015, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in an internal memo, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day." This was in response to the incident at hand back then. Feminist writer Lindy West had been getting deluge after deluge of abusive tweets, including from one account fashioned to appear to be her recently deceased father. Around the same time, Anita Sarkeesian, known for her Games vs Tropes series was receiving graphic threats via Twitter, some of which included the names of her family and her home address. It was a quote from West that originally prompted Costolo to admit that Twitter hadn’t necessarily been doing it's utmost to prevent these situations.
I’m aware that Twitter is well within its rights to let its platform be used as a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment. But, as a private company – just like a comedian mulling over a rape joke, or a troll looking for a target for his anger – it could choose not to. As a collective of human beings, it could choose to be better. -- Lindy West, What happened when I confronted my cruellest trollTwitter acknowledged the abuse and made reporting accounts easier since. It would then follow that we would see less tweets like these right?
#WomenBoycottTwitter
This leads us to today’s Twitter, wherein tweeting a phone number can get your account suspended, but threatening nuclear war is just fine. It takes a lot for an account to be suspended, and even more for a Twitter user to be banned. But last week, actress Rose McGowan’s account was suspended for violating Twitter’s policies following her public call out of Ben Affleck over his alleged complacency in Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment being brought against him from upwards of twenty women.
Nuclear War is Fine
Overall, users were upset with Twitter’s history of selectively applying their own rules to who gets suspended over policy violations. To this, current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that Twitter needs to build trust with its users by trying to be more transparent. https://twitter.com/jack/status/918508443631108096 The whole of the thread beneath the tweet reads as Twitter’s sins: abusive users gone unbanned, Holocaust-denying bots continuing to function, and users’ personal experiences with death threats that, unlike McGowan’s tweets, were ignored by Twitter. https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/918537661609947136 https://twitter.com/JarettSays/status/918508861144776704 https://twitter.com/timcourtney/status/918510629115359232 https://twitter.com/jordanroth/status/918513671038365696 https://twitter.com/rosemcgowan/status/918549157387710464 Twitter stated last month that it will not remove tweets that are considered newsworthy, this statement following Donald Trump’s inflammatory tweets toward North Korea and the question of whether or not threatening nuclear war breaks Twitter’s terms and conditions. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232 Earlier this summer, the White House confirmed that @realDonaldTrump’s tweets are official presidential statements. On its face, this makes sense because Trump’s tweets are very clearly his own words. There’s been significant controversy over several issues involving the president’s twitter, including but not limited to his blocking of people who disagree with him, several accusatory tweets, and of course the infamous “covfefe” tweet. Twitter’s importance when it comes to presidential policy was made terrifyingly apparent last month when after an aggressive tweet from Trump, North Korea stated that the United States had declared war on them, thus giving them the justification of shooting down US bombers even outside of North Korean airspace as a defensive countermeasure. Can you declare war on another country via a tweet? White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “Frankly, the suggestion of that is absurd.” But why should it be? So many other declarations that impact the country have been made through Twitter, so why not this? The state of the president’s Twitter seems to be in this weird limbo where we as citizens are simultaneously expected to take his tweets as official statements, and as just trivial tweets. They’re an uncensored look into what’s going on in our government, a unique chance to know the inner machinations of a head of state as never before. And I’m not saying that as a good thing. Just yesterday North Korea again cited Trump’s tweets as “provocations” and stated that they would unleash a salvo of missiles on Guam should he continue. Whatever one might think of Donald Trump’s twitter, or Twitter itself, the platform has become a staple of statement. Twitter is where one can find precisely what’s on the national conscience, a kind of global soapbox nee water cooler. Twitter is the conduit through which movements like #WomenBoycottTwitter gain attention and action. Twitter is where news breaks, where a nobody’s well-worded aside can become globally recognized and where a significant portion of us go to get informed. But it's also where people can face horrific rape threats. It’s where one nation can apparently provoke another into nuclear war. Twitter, like the internet itself, is a tool easily weaponized.Sources: The Verge, The Guardian, Slate, The New York Times, Mashable, CNN, Twitter, and Independent Images: Instagram, Business Insider, Twitter
