After years of being subjected to the law of the jungle, the social network of the bird has decided to end the “conversation toxic” in the internet

Your problem is how to find the balance between the freedom of expression that did flag in their origin and application (sometimes delusional) of its own rules

In the summer of 2017, the German artist of israeli origin Shahak Shapira, tired of denouncing without success hundreds of racist messages that she had read on Twitter, was planted in front of the offices of the company in Hamburg and, armed with a spray can and some stencils, reproduced dozens of these tweets in front of the doors of the building. There were insults to black people, phrases, sexist, threats to gays, speeches by holocaust deniers about the Holocaust… you know, have read countless tweets similar in Spain. “If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they will also have to see them,” said Shapira. According to him, Facebook has deleted hundreds of similar messages, but Twitter did not react (timidly) to her performance.

A year or so before that, the company of the little bird, who always boasted of being “a wing of the freedom of expression in the celebration of the freedom of expression,” had begun to be taken seriously in your problem precisely with… the freedom of expression. Created, a decade after its foundation, the Council of Confidence and Security, and recruited more than 40 organizations and experts from around the world to “ensure that people can continue speaking freely and safely on Twitter”.

The job -as demonstrated Shapira – was not very effective, and at the end of last year Jack Dorsey, CEO of the company, announced more drastic measures. “We see that there are voices that are silenced every day on Twitter. We have been working to counteract this for the last two years, but has not sufficed. In 2017, we make it our top priority and we have made much progress but there are still those who believe that we are not doing enough, so we have decided to adopt a more aggressive stance,” said the chief in several tweets.

In the past two years, Twitter is aware that his air was becoming more toxic, has introduced more than 50 policy changes, products, and operations to make the experience of their users more secure and to “strengthen the health of the online conversation”. The company says it held meetings every day to work on it. Its new rules aimed at combating sexual harassment, nudity without consent, hate speech or the glorification of violence. The problem is how to get it.

“The focus of our initiative is to find the right balance between freedom of expression and the absolute necessity of people feel safe online,” explains Karen White, director of Public Policy for Twitter in Europe. “It’s a challenge, and not always what we are going to do well. As society and culture change, so do the types of behavior and the contours of the conversations that we see in our service, so we must adapt and evolve.”

The focus of our initiative is to find the balance between freedom of expression and the absolute necessity of people feeling safe on line

Karen White, director of Public Policy for Twitter in Europe

In July of this year, The Washington Post revealed that Twitter had been deleted in only two months over 70 million accounts within your campaign against harmful activity on the network. In its latest Transparency report, made public this Thursday, the multinational recognizes that each week put to the test 10 million of profiles of suspects of spam and assures that complaints of spam have not stopped declining in the past few months.

From the company point out that their obsession now is to detect the behavior on the social network and not only moderate the content. And to do this have not ceased to tighten their standards. Remember that Twitter is a private company and reserves the right of admission, such as bars. If you don’t like their rules, there you have the door or there you have Instagram or WhatsApp, even a book. The theory says that if you post a lot in the social network, Twitter will ask you to delete it. If you do not, be limited temporarily to your account and, if you insist, suspend your account permanently and will block any new profile that you want to create. The practice, however, says that the ideal world that dreams of the company is still far from being a reality.

Let’s look at an example of only a few days ago. Ulises Lafuente, writer and comic artist, nearly 6,000 followers on Twitter, he posted the following message on the network: “this is The fault of the left that makes no campaigns advocating for the killing of fags”. It is understood that it was a tweet ironic after the rise of the radical right in Spain, but it included two words, “kill,” and “fags”, that were enough to Twitter to close your account for a few hours.

“this Is the first time that happens to me, however I know that is something usual on the platform,” says Lafuente. “Often you will see users lamenting the same thing, and because in addition to the use of the same word that was included in my tweet: ‘to kill’. Twitter is seen in the commitment of having to moderate millions and millions of daily messages written by users from all over the world, and it is logistically impossible that this work of moderation to be carried out by human personnel, so that they end up delegating to algorithms and artificial intelligence”.

According to Twitter this is not so. It is true that the company does not act ex officio, so someone needs to report the message prior to responding. But ensure that it is always a team who decides on the suspension of an account. Your system of artificial intelligence only acts against bots or spam or to identify patterns of behavior in the fight against terrorism. According to Twitter, is a person who decides to close an account; another thing is that this human understand the irony or context of a particular message.

“At the time in which another user complaint your account, they investigate all your tweets,” says Lafuente. “The proproblem is that Twitter is a social network where they usually write messages depending on what the rest of the world is tweeting in that moment, and it’s practically incomprehensible the reading of tweets from today out of context. The result is that it is a system exploitable by precisely those to which Twitter aims to stop”.

In recent times the perception of censorship on Twitter has been triggered by the closing of the accounts or profiles of well-known characters. Happened to Frank Cuesta after responding to Dani Mateo for his famous gag blowing their nose a runny nose with the flag of Spain, happened also to the journalist Hermann Terstch for their excesses to the account of The Poolside snack bar and even to the Collective of Victims of Terrorism. According to Terstch, the reason is that “the extreme left has always been the head of Twitter”.

“I for nothing I think that Twitter is more left-wing than right-wing, but I do think that a side moving more than the others to silence anyone who bothers them and this in the end creates almost a club of survivors that encourages all kinds of theories conspiranoicas”. Who is talking @godivaciones, Mary White in real life, economist, university professor and activist liberal, according to his self-portrait. Last month also suspended the account after you tell from his profile that he had refused to postpone an exam to his students, who claimed at the last minute “a strike against sexism in the classroom.” The wrath cyber are fattened with it, and was punished without account for a few hours. Between the tweets of your history which were reported to mass-there was one addressed to a friend who said something like this: “One day I introduce you to my daughter Charlotte… you will die of laughter.”

did You die? ¡Error!

“I was crushed and I started even to receive messages from friends that Twitter gave thanks for having me denounced even though they had done nothing. That is the real problem, and not the censorship. Security. It is relatively easy to hack into your account and denounce your name. Twitter allows people to harass and take down maliciously other people’s profiles. If tweeting of football, nothing happens, but if you you put politically and you have some punch, track your timeline, and before or after you find a word reportable”.

– is it worth paying the price of losing the account for a few hours if it is just with the aggressiveness?

-it Would be worth if it actually worked, but it doesn’t work. Twitter is deleting accounts but does not eliminate the problem. Anyone who wants to can threaten you of death without using the word death, and Twitter or as a whole, however, the hackers we cut down the account in a moment. I’m not leaving Twitter because I have a pipe, but it is a pity that the lack of security install the wrong roll so many fun people. There are accounts that are going to go and Twitter will end up being so languid that young people will not come ever.

Twitter has sown so much noise over the years which can’t pretend to fix it now from one day to another

Francesc Pujol, a specialist in on line reputation

in order To relativize this psychosis by the alleged gag of Twitter, the company reminds that the number of accounts reported for abuse is less than 1% of the total. What is the problem then? Does the censorship, the excessive tolerance or balance impossible between the two things?

Francesc Pujol is a professor of economics and a specialist in online reputation. According to his analysis, the problem of Twitter is that you never established a few frames clear of control as defined by platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or Facebook and when she has wanted to do this, the software had already been installed. “The solution lies in the hands of Twitter. The content that you allow to it at the end of the content that favored them and Twitter has generated a dynamic, clear of conflict, of shock, of a noise with which the company has been happy for many years because he gave vitality, traffic, advertising… short-term, that model Save me worked because it was toxic but addictive. The problem is that now they have realized that long-term does not work and the sad thing is that they do not change because they want to recover their essence, but because they see that they lose revenue and profitability.”

– what Is Twitter time?

-Depends on them, but have sown so much shit that this is not fixed from one day to another. Over the years they have become accustomed to the flood, to stalkers, to work happy and calm on Twitter. You can’t feed the gremlins and now pretend to be gizmos.

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