Instagram's War on Bullying
time.com
time.com
The head of Instagrams public policy is very correct when she states: Teens are exceptionally creative. Assholes and bullies have always existed, 25 years ago at least you had a respite at home after school, but now social media makes victims available 24-7.
Not to sound defeatist, but I don't think social media can exist while preventing bullying. For the victims it's binary, either they're being bullied or they're not, so social media needs to prevent 100% for bullying and that is not going to happen, people will always find a way to be assholes.
In my mind the effort is misplaced, at least for teenagers who often know the bully. It's the schools and parents that need to take action, not some random faceless US corporation.
For 100% online bullying... I don't think there's away around that. You can try to reduce the amount, but you won't be able to eliminate it.
Things like Whatsapp not giving you a way to prevent you from being added to a group (until very recently) are fixable. Victims could not even prevent themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.
If I translate your post to spam filtering all efforts there are useless and everyone should disable their spam filters, because either you receive spam or you don't.
What’s the difference between inviting Jimmy to that group and just messaging him in private asking him to kill himself? Seems like a pointless feature. (Let’s remember that users you’ve blocked could never add you to groups.)
I think we need to address bullies directly, figure out their reasoning and help to resolve those issues. Problem is few actually do get addressed long before it's too late.
That's not a good reason for (e.g., Whatsapp) to not put in some frankly minimal effort to prevent this on their platform.
It really isn't. You can mentally deal with a spam email or two a day. It only takes one nasty message or post on social media to devastate a kid for a month, so you need 100% perfect protection and you're not going to get that, regardless of how much monitoring, moderating and AI you throw at the problem.
My argument isn't that we shouldn't try to prevent online bullying, but we need to set our goals for success lower than we'd like. If Instagram tries to prevent bullying, we can't complain when they aren't 100% successful, but people will do just that.
That's fine. Just because you can't completely solve a problem doesn't mean you shouldn't take steps to mitigate it. Perfect is the enemy of good, etc.
The way they measure the decrease in toxicity is based on support tickets. When organizations implement this feature, a reduction in complaints means they don't require as much support staff to deal with it. It saves them money.
The logic behind it is simple: Toxic community members want a voice to be heard. This method sends players the message that if you post something offensive or unwelcomed, it'll be voted down and no one will see it.
Seems these days the second option is always the preferred one. It's easier to ask forgiveness (and make money while you do) than it is to get permission.
Not on the internet, no. The 2/4/8/whatever-chans are alive and kicking. Ditto the good old IRC. There's plenty of other services that are more rough-and-tumble than milktoasty. Any of the new social media like Mastodon, Minds, BitChute have rather hands-off moderation - any lawfull content has rather good chances of staying there undisturbed.
The difference is one of perception - namely, which ones get favorable opinions in the media as family safe, and which ones get condemned as the seedy, scary underbelly.
I doubt media has that much influence on platform choice today.
These places are almost like art. Fully dependent on the goodwill of a handful of patrons that regard them as valuable while many would prefer to see them dissapear.
I don't think it's as many as some think. A lot of this censorship banter comes from a very vocal minority who appear to be a majority only in their own minds.
The point was placing profits over the protection makes sense from their perspective. They take a big risk whatever option they choose, might as well make money doing it. And they will certainly be forgiven because on the internet memory is very short. Or perhaps many people just don't care. Facebook's user numbers have been steadily increasing for years.
I feel it's only a matter of time before they get blocked at the router or at least DNS level in a western European country. They were blocked in New Zealand for a while after the chan-radicalized mass murder there.
I assume this person could have gotten radicalized by talking to other radicals on the phone, so you ban phones?
But they didn't, that's a detail you can't just conveniently drop to argue in the abstract.
Because there was a more convenient option. I think they'll just run their own alternative, especially as domains are cheap. Also, what about that namecoin thing? Seems like a workaround.
edit: nice meme bc who actually uses TOR? theres so much more cp on surface web liek chans, tumblr used to be a pedos dream, twitter etc.
no one uses tor zzz
https://sputniknews.com/science/201905091074866833-Twitter-3...
you can literally google twitter child porn
theres hundreds of threads exposing how these people start group dms baiting kids
https://twitter.com/xcutesannex/status/1147456947727282177 shit in a similar format to this
But yes, increasing the pressure on these kind of online spaces seems to have had a overall negative effect. If you don't know the demographic and how gripers react to pressure, you should not preach about the source of radicalization.
And yes, you also will net the ire of people that like their freedom and haven't done anything.
Not only that, it wasn't one person, or rather it was not one person alone. He was fed, indoctrinated and enabled by his co-conspirators who egged him on with anti-Islam material. In some sense they got off lightly: if the situation had been reversed and we were talking about an Islamic supremacist board promoting violence against Christians which resulted in a massacre, they might have been candidates for an airstrike. "We kill people based on metadata", remember? https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
The ban would most likely be for refusal to comply with rules regarding extremist or crime-promoting material. For example the UK has a unit pointed at the major social networks making binding takedown requests against (primarily) Daesh material: https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Counter-Terrorism_Inte...
There are proposals to make the terrorist takedown regime mandatory across Europe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45495544
At the moment the authorities are surprisingly un-worried about white supremacist terrorism compared to Islamist terrorism, of which there is very little on the chans. So they largely escape takedown requirements. But if the extremism escalates that may not stay that way.
This thinking will lead to following: that you will simultaneously alienate people by random nonsensical moderation while being accused of placing profits over the protection of kids. And the both accusations will be right simultaneously.
They could, but it wouldn't be instagrams problem then.
Continuously closing accounts, blocking content and reporting bullying isn't fixing anything. In some cases I get the feeling that it will make the problem worse.
We want to stop the bullying, not simply remove the evidence of it. Instagram can't prevent bullying, they can only hide parts of it.
But they can take steps to mitigate it on their platform. If you're doing your best and genuinely helping solve the problem on your platform, then you can say to kids, "hey - come hang out on this platform. It's a safer place. This is a place where you can socialize with less risk than other places."
That's good for the kids, and for the platform.
Arguing against is like saying, "My kid gets bullied, but why should I only solve the problem for him?"
That's not what it is like at all, though. I would say your approach is more similar to "my kid is being bullied at a local community pool, so instead of trying to address the bullying issue occurring to my kid directly, I will simply try to institute a bunch of rules to make that local pool a 'bully-free zone'".
That sounds like a great idea for a pool to implement, and I would feel better about taking my kid there vs. the local arcade that just shrugged their shoulders and said "what do you want, if they don't get bullied here, they'll get bullied elsewhere."
It's not "no risk", it's not a safe space, it's just safer than it could have been with no policing. And which other spaces is it safer than? School, the kids room, or 4Chan? Because I would argue that 4Chan is safer than Facebook or Instagram.
You need to address bullying on an individual level, because there's nothing you can do on a large scale that will eliminate all bullying.
Why is everyone treating this as the only acceptable condition?
I wonder if Instagram would pay me for this ingenious solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal
The persecuted should not have to live life on the run, fleeing from one ever-shrinking, insecure refuge to another. Instead, we hold victimizers responsible for the problems they cause, and insist on fixing those problems at the source.
If the social circle you are in doesn't kick assholes you find another one.
But in school someone can just terrorize everyone else with impunity because people are usually not expelled, you can't easily choose a school that expels people and the abusers don't care about being ostracized or potentially expelled because they don't care about being in school in the first place.
Remember kids, your happiness is less important than warehousing you so your parents can go to work.
I can only imagine the ostracization if children were allowed to opt out of classes based up on classmates - you'd be left with the one picked-on kid all alone because no one wanted to be in their class.