(2013-07-31) Filtering Abuse On Twitter And Others

Some Women, such as Caroline Criado Perez, who do anything visible, become targets of Verbal Abuse online from some men, esp via Twitter (because of the combination of Asymmetric Follow with high public visibility).

In many cases this abuse goes as far as Threats Of Violence, including Rape.

There is often some Dox Ing involved as well, which makes the threats more... threatening.

Many have called for a Red Flag process on Twitter that would result in offenders having their accounts frozen.

I'm rather uncomfortable with that. While Twitter is a private organization, the Oligopoly of the Social Networking EcoSystem makes such blocking a De Facto Censorship issue.

• How did you feel about WikiLeaks getting kicked off Amazon Web Services and being blocked by Credit Card companies?

Alternatives? (these can be used in combination)

• contacting the Police Department once true Fear is involved
• reverse-Dox Ing - identifying the culprit, letting his wife/mother know what he has said. (I'm not crazy about going to his Employer, as that seems to cross a different line.) (On the other-other-hand, posting about him in public, which might result in his Employer finding the info, is fine.)
• some Reputation Management code to make such noise less visible, esp to the target
  • Yellow Flag messages from new accounts (or those with few followers), with some keyword filtering, and
    • don't email the target ("bob just mentioned you") or show it under "interactions"
    • don't have those tweets show up in searches of the target's handle (by the target, or by anyone?)
  • some sort of shareable-Black List (Web Of Trust) model which doesn't create a global Black List, but just a Black List used by the people who choose to use it. Not unlike apps that let you Boycott certain businesses (in your purchasing or investing) that get flagged by some set of filters you pick from.
    • of course, this raises the Governance question of who decides who's on a given Black List, and is there an appeals process, etc.
    • maybe each user creates her own Black List, and "subscribes" to any number of other people's Black List-s, and only ignores tweets from handles appearing on some number of those Black List-s...

Other ideas?

Nov'2014: Most Social Media companies prefer not to talk about their content-moderation systems, but last week Twitter divulged a few details... It’s easy to scoff at Sullivan’s fears about the coming reign of “leftist feminists,” but he’s right to suggest that Twitter’s new harassment protocol won’t be ideologically neutral. Censorship—even the kind of small-“c” censorship, without which no magazine or social-media platform or comedy club can endure—never is.

• cf GamerGate