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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

What should happen when a person's twitter account is mentioned in an article that creates viral outrage, and they are bombarded with death threats, hate speech, and so forth?

Do they:

Block all the nasty tweets?

Set their account to private?

Ignore it?

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There's nothing wrong with Twitter providing tools to help someone being harassed. That, in and of itself, does not prevent free speech. If someone's Twitter goes viral and they don't want to deal with messages directed at them then give them a whitelist that they can add people they want to receive comments from and the drop the rest. This only affects the view of the person affected while not constraining what can be seen by the public.

> There's nothing wrong with Twitter providing tools to help someone being harassed.

Nothing wrong, except those tools don't exist today.

Sure, that doesn't mean that arbitrarily defining things as 'hate-speech' and censoring them completely for everyone is the right solution.

I don't think there's anything arbitrary about defining death/rape threats as hate speech.

So define and ban those things directly, rather than something nebulous.

This would be best. It's sort of telling that Steve Huffman, CEO of reddit, had this to say about reddit's content policy enacted about a year ago:

>When you draw really clear lines in the sand at a site like Reddit, “there will always be some a—–,” Huffman said, “looking for loopholes.” He eventually came to the conclusion that virtually every other major social site has come to: that content guidelines for online communities work best when they’re “specifically vague,” giving the contours of clarity on what sort of content is forbidden, while affording those in charge of enforcing the rules some leeway with when, precisely, the rules apply.[1]

That's the CEO of reddit saying that selective enforcement should be the default, and that users should not lean on the actual, written rules to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable.

[1] Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...

Death and rape threats are crimes, not "hate speech".

Your comment is completely non sequitur. That such a thing doesn't exist today does not invalidate my point which is that there are technical solutions to this that do not rely on the platforms inserting themselves as judge of what is hate speech and what isn't hate speech.

This policy about removing hate comments didn't exist yesterday and is still not in place. By your logic it isn't a solution either and can't be discussed because it's not yet in place.

I think the fact that these tools don't exist speaks to Twitter's priorities, though, and in a discussion of editorial control of social platforms that seems like a salient point.

They could put a toggle in settings that anyone can use. Call it 'Airplane mode' or 'Do not disturb'.

When enabled, the 'Notifications' link/page disappears from the UI and the user no longer receives messages from anyone who they haven't messaged before.

Not hard to do at all.

Better to make it a whitelist in case somebody no longer wants to receive messages from somebody they've corresponded with in the past. Otherwise if they've ever corresponded with a troll or have had a falling out with friends then the filter is ineffective.

The more I talk about this the more it sounds like a score file[1]. Obviously it would need to be made more user-friendly to be really effective.

[1] http://slrn.sourceforge.net/docs/slrn-FAQ-4.html

Except that still requires them to go through and filter stuff.

Implementing a per-user configurable whitelist is much different than making value judgements about someone's post berift of context and history and virtue-signalling with a swing of the almighty banhammer. It puts control in the hands of the user, who is trusted to make their own judgement.

I think it's useful to talk about a real concrete example, so thank you for this comment.

Ideally, people wouldn't send death threats/hate speech. This seems practically unenforceable from Twitter's side.

So what if Twitter had a special feature where it could detect if you are receiving an unusual spike in notifications (and possibly even use sentiment analysis). Then it would present you with a nice, warm message:

"We noticed you're receiving an unusually high number of notifications. These messages may be abusive, hateful, or triggering."

Then provide options for turning your profile private, or a special new setting that completely hides @-notifications from people you don't follow.

Why is "stop using Twitter" not at the top of that list?

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