Twitter: Free Speech in 140 Characters
The virtues of pseudonymity in an age of full disclosure
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GoogleIt was a typical Thursday night on Twitter. Mid-December, 6 p.m. Pacific Time. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was riffing on why the GOP should endorse over-the-counter birth control. Jenna Haze, two-time winner of the FAME Dirtiest Girl in Porn award, was posting an Instagrammed photo of storm clouds lit by the setting sun. Whole Foods Markets wanted to let everyone know that groceries make thoughtful Christmas gifts. And the hip hop artist The Game and scores of his fans were jawing at the conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.
Malkin’s website Twitchy.com, whose brand of sustainable post-peak journalism feasts on foraged tweets to produce a timely stream of snarky outrage, had published an item about the cover artwork on The Game’s new album, Jesus Piece. Even The Game had described this artwork as “controversial.” It shows Jesus with a teardrop tattoo on his cheek and a red bandanna covering the lower half of his face, the Lamb of God as gangsta Messiah.
Twitchy harvested reactions the image had inspired on Twitter—some positive, some negative—and appended a parting shot: “Would The Game dare to do to Allah what he did to Jesus Christ? Just asking, though we already know the answer. Peace out.”
The Game did not peace out. “#BOYCOTT @michellemalkin NOW!,” he Tweeted. “She’s racist, & makin racial & blasphemist comments about my album. Same b!$&% said Obama isnt AMERICAN RT.”
That such charges were baseless did nothing to deter loyal Game fans, who started peppering Malkin with ugly tweets. “fuck that racist Asian looking hoe!” exclaimed one. Another threatened to rape her. A third suggested she needed to be hit in the head with a Louisville Slugger. Malkin, whose career is based on courting confrontation rather than routing around it, struck back quickly, sometimes with sarcasm (“You need TwitterViagra”), sometimes with Biblical verse (“Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”)
Her fans entered the fray too, and for the next several hours, in an awesome display of Twitter’s capacity to inspire unlikely convergence, dozens of disparate individuals, many of them operating under pseudonyms, found common ground in their quest to see how much contempt for one another they could pack into the 140 characters Twitter allots per post.
As the drama unfolded, Twitter did what it generally does in such situations: nothing. Maintaining order on the micro-publishing platform is the responsibility of Twitter’s Trust & Safety department, which, despite its Orwellian moniker and intimations of bland bureaucratic intrusiveness, is more free-range parent than helicopter mom. Until a user proactively files a complaint about another user’s behavior, Trust & Safety stays on the sidelines. And even when complaints are filed, it often takes no action.
This strategy appears to be paying off. In a little over a year, Twitter’s user base doubled, going from 100 million monthly active users in September 2011 to 200 million monthly active users in December 2012.
Trust & Safety
If you want to talk with a Twitter employee in person, prepare to be vigorously authenticated. In the small, ground-floor entryway of the downtown San Francisco building where the social media company is headquartered, a security guard behind the front desk demands picture ID from all visitors. Once you are matched against a list of expected guests and sign in, you can proceed to the elevator, where another security guard punches in the floor you have been cleared to visit. (The interior of the elevator has no control panel, so it’s impossible to reroute your trip on the fly.) The elevator opens onto Twitter’s 9th floor lobby, where you sign in one more time and receive a name badge. Then a PR person will emerge to escort you to your designated appointment.
Mine was with Del Harvey, director of Trust & Safety. In October 2008, when Twitter had only a couple dozen employees and approximately 6 million monthly users (according to the market research firm eMarketer), it hired Harvey to head up the standards department. Harvey had a good friend who was an engineer at the company, and when Twitter decided it needed to do something about the increasing number of spam and abuse complaints that were arising with the service’s exponential growth, Harvey’s friend suggested her for the job. “My friend was like, ‘I know somebody who is super, super obsessive-compulsive, she’d be fantastic at this,’ ” Harvey recalls. “My interview was like a 20-minute phone call, and then I was hired.”
Before joining Twitter, Harvey worked for five years at Perverted-Justice.com, a nonprofit that targets online predators by posing as underage teens in chatrooms. When Harvey joined Twitter, she wasn’t just the head of Trust & Safety; she was the entire department. Today she oversees a staff of around three dozen, who monitor the excesses of the estimated 500 million Tweets per day. As the Daily Dot noted in August 2012, when Twitter was averaging 340 million daily tweets, a five-second manual review of each one would “take the equivalent of 35,416 eight-hour shifts.” At a half-billion per day, subjecting just 1 percent of Twitter’s output to such cursory human discretion would take approximately 868 eight-hour shifts, absorbing the attention of roughly all of Twitter’s current staff.
Those impossible figures help explain one of the company’s core mantras: “We don’t mediate content,” Harvey says. “We don’t proactively go out and do stuff that frankly wouldn’t be scalable.” Instead, Twitter simply explains what users can and cannot say and do in the Terms of Service (TOS) and Rules that it posts on the site. Other Internet juggernauts do the same, but what makes Twitter stand out in this field is the extent to which its house rules embrace laissez faire.
Consider, for example, some statements that appear in the user policies of other sites. “You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence,” Facebook commands. “Colorful language and imagery is fine, but there’s no need for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, and other displays of bigotry,” Yelp says. Flickr “is not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we’ll send you a warning or delete your account.”
Twitter, in contrast, governs in much less proscriptive fashion. “All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content,” its TOS reads. “We may not monitor or control the Content posted via the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content. Any use or reliance on any Content or materials posted via the Services or obtained by you through the Services is at your own risk.” In its Rules section, Twitter reaffirms this hands-off policy: “We do not actively monitor user’s content and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances.”
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lol, never thought about it like that dude.
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Well, Colour-Bot, I see the irony is lost upon thee.
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After struggling to understand twitter (and smartphones in general), I now know what my grandmother felt like trying to use the remote control for the TV.
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From perverted justice to twitter... Is Chris Hansen the driving force behind tumblr?
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A way to have a type of international free speech, whats not to love. Everyone can be a a town crier. No pun intended. Suckerberg should go back to Orwellian School and spend a few hours with his head in hungry rats cage for suggesting we all get our government issued net ID. People are insulted, make them be quiet. Obama insults my intelligence daily, nobody has suggested muzzling that asshole.
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So what is the deal with Twitter? I'm younger than 30, but I have had absolutely zero interest in using the service. Nothing worth saying can be said in such a short space.
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It's a top shelf newsfeed, I subscribe to AP, Reason, a few science related, a few local news, and a few humor sites like the Onion. I don't tweet, but since you can customize who you follow it's the best newsfeed you'll find. And most tweets link to a picture or article, so once you read the headline you can decide if you want to know more. It hasn't replaced my WSJ, but its replaced my local newspaper and magazine subscriptions.
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Ah. Well, I guess I am content for now with The Economist as my news aggregator.
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“fuck that racist Asian looking hoe!”
Oh the irony. I can never be sure if they are serious or just trolling.
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They are serious. I tried to understand and find the 'common ground' and have 'dialogue' about race, ethics, and law. What a waste of time. Like many words, racism has a different definition to the socialists. It is a title of victimhood bestowed upon political allies to help win in political conflict. It has no other modern meaning. I have determined it has nothing to do with: minority status, ethics, concepts of racial inferiority or superiority, racial biases, stereotyping, discrimination, equal application of the law for all races, or any other measure or definition which a reasoned person might use to describe the term.
-Racism is a weapon granted Democratic political allies, the wielder of the weapon need not have been a harmed, oppressed, discriminated against, or even inconvenienced in this life. They are using this weapon nearly non-stop now, I hear the word like the chattering of gunfire from every news source. The SOLE qualification to be handed this powerful weapon: Ally of the Left.
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If the charges of racism are so meaningless and empty of content, why is it such a ¨powerful weapon¨ against the right?
I think your analysis is lacking unless you can answer that question.
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I never said it wasn't successful or that it's actual meaning (and real history of racism baked into law) didn't still give the word power with the masses. Because of the socialist use of the word, it's forced me to come to another understanding of its meaning when used by a socialist.
How often do you see documented cases of racism with evidential support in the media used with the intent to drive social change or even regulatory change and how often have you seen it used only as a weapon without evidential support to discredit political foes? I see almost only the latter.
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¨to discredit political foes¨
That´s certainly true, and you can add that claiming victimhood is also a way to further ones own agenda, on the left or the right. Here´s a short passage from Don DeLillo´s long novel ¨Underworld¨ on the phenomenon in the corporate world:
¨In the bronze tower we used the rhetoric of aggrieved minorities to prevent legislation that would hurt our business. Arthur Blessing believed, our CEO, that true feeling flows upward from the streets, fully accessible to corporate adaptation. We learned how to complain, how to appropriate the language of victimization. Arthur listened to gangsta rap on the car radio every morning. Songs about getting mad and getting laid and getting even, taking what's rightfully ours by violent means if necessary. He believed this was the only form of address that made an impact on Washington. Arthur recited lyrics to me once on the company plane and together we laughed his wacko laugh, those enunciated ha-has, clear and slow and well spaced, like laughing with words.¨
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My Onion Feed on Twitter:
"This Week's top Video | 'The State of the Union is Strong,' says Man Burdened with Protecting Us From the Truth.