Obviously, much to criticize in SA. But
December 22, 2016 1:18 PM Subscribe
"The structural forces oppressing the most marginalized Saudis in the streets and prisons, it turns out, do not wither in the presence of a 4G data connection. The most popular Saudi accounts on Twitter aren’t bold young entrepreneurs challenging the social order; they’re hardline preachers who tell those young people that they should be put to death if they lay with someone of the same sex. The people who want to punish sinners don’t end their pursuit of heresy once they log on. In fact, Saudi Arabia shows how easily the tools tech entrepreneurs imagine will liberate the world can be bent to the service of oppression of the vulnerable." Felix Biederman in Deadspin: Your App Isn't Helping the People of Saudi Arabia
Can't use technology to solve a people problem.
posted by rhizome at 1:34 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by rhizome at 1:34 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
However, "But what about activists in [fill-in-the-blank]" Is a great excuse not to do anything about the online culture that encourages anonymous harassment, doxxing and false news.
Activists in Saudi Arabia and other countries are being used as excuses by everyone from Twitter to Tor to maintain the status quo of social media as an unsafe place. .
posted by happyroach at 1:36 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
Activists in Saudi Arabia and other countries are being used as excuses by everyone from Twitter to Tor to maintain the status quo of social media as an unsafe place. .
posted by happyroach at 1:36 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
Activists in Saudi Arabia and other countries are being used as excuses by everyone from Twitter to Tor to maintain the status quo of social media as an unsafe place. .
Or maybe it's legitimately a difficult thing to solve! (It depends on what we're talking about but if the question is "why not just block Tor users from your service?" this is 100 percent a real dilemma.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:39 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
Or maybe it's legitimately a difficult thing to solve! (It depends on what we're talking about but if the question is "why not just block Tor users from your service?" this is 100 percent a real dilemma.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:39 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
(I agree with what Felix is saying here but shutting down anonymity doesn't exactly help that.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:43 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 1:43 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
I knew going in that the Saudi regime was a nonstop flood of horrors and still found parts of that surprising and hard to read. The bit about the apps and Srinivasan's idiotic Tweets are really just the tip of the iceberg.
posted by Copronymus at 1:49 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Copronymus at 1:49 PM on December 22, 2016 [3 favorites]
Biederman is 1/3rd of the founding group of dirtbag left podcast Chapo Trap House, now 1/5th (1/6th if you count the producer) of the current group.
As much as they are bagged on for their uncivil and well...dirtbaggy ethos, this kind of compassionate and deeply informed perspective is the beating heart of that show.
posted by turntraitor at 2:31 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
As much as they are bagged on for their uncivil and well...dirtbaggy ethos, this kind of compassionate and deeply informed perspective is the beating heart of that show.
posted by turntraitor at 2:31 PM on December 22, 2016 [7 favorites]
He's also one half of Carl Diggler.
posted by atoxyl at 2:54 PM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 2:54 PM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
However, "But what about activists in [fill-in-the-blank]" Is a great excuse not to do anything about the online culture that encourages anonymous harassment, doxxing and false news.
Activists in Saudi Arabia and other countries are being used as excuses by everyone from Twitter to Tor to maintain the status quo of social media as an unsafe place. .
Sure. I don't think this article means to excuse Twitter's lackluster moderation, though. After the paragraph quoted in the FPP, Biederman continues:
Activists in Saudi Arabia and other countries are being used as excuses by everyone from Twitter to Tor to maintain the status quo of social media as an unsafe place. .
Sure. I don't think this article means to excuse Twitter's lackluster moderation, though. After the paragraph quoted in the FPP, Biederman continues:
Despite the grave consequences for users, Twitter’s support team is unable to take action. Most of the time when a Saudi user’s personal information is shared on Twitter, the doxer in question isn’t suspended. If they are, it’s many days after the information has been disseminated, and the punishments for the person unfortunate enough to have been doxed have likely been dealt out. When I spoke to someone familiar with Twitter’s corporate structure, they told me that the company simply doesn’t have enough Arabic speakers on its support team to police doxxing in Saudi Arabia.posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:17 PM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
(Twitter did, it should be noted, have sufficient skill in Arabic to cash a $300 million check from Prince al-Waleed bin Talal.)
I’ve known about Saudi doxing for years, but the severity of the problem was made clear earlier this year, when a Twitter user known as @old_gaes incited his followers to report a 16-year-old Kuwaiti atheist’s identity to her family. (The story was detailed by the Daily Beast’s Ben Collins here.)
I, along with others, implored people to report him, but his account and the threats he made to this child’s safety remained up, until one intrepid user found his insults against the Dubai police and threatened to report him in kind, causing him to deactivate. Ratting is a double edged sword.
He is, of the time of this writing, suspended. But given how quickly Twitter will respond to blue-checkmarked power users crying harassment, it was painful to see the company completely ignore scores of reports they were getting warning of the very real possibility that a child’s life had been endangered.
So, Twitter has become a tool to enable repressive regimes, has a deeply-engrained harassment problem (that it has never bothered trying to solve), has never earned a dime of profit, and has no reasonable chance of ever doing so.
HOW ON EARTH IS TWITTER STILL A THING!? The fact that it continues to exist in its current form defies all logic.
posted by schmod at 11:59 PM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
HOW ON EARTH IS TWITTER STILL A THING!? The fact that it continues to exist in its current form defies all logic.
posted by schmod at 11:59 PM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
HOW ON EARTH IS TWITTER STILL A THING!? The fact that it continues to exist in its current form defies all logic.
Because it is built to prevent the changes that would fix those things, thanks to a bunch of free speech fetishists. When the prior CEO tried to delete ISIS beheading video tweets, well...
Weeks later, when a rash of beheading videos appeared, Costolo gave similar takedown orders, causing Twitter’s free speech advocates, Gabriel Stricker and Vijaya Gadde, to call an emergency policy meeting.
Inside the meeting, attended by Costolo, Stricker, Gadde, and product head Kevin Weil (now Instagram’s product lead) and first reported by BuzzFeed News, tensions rose as Costolo’s desire to build a more palatable network that was marketable and ultimately attractive to new users clashed with Stricker and Gadde’s desire for radically free expression.
“You really think we should have videos of people being murdered?” someone who attended the meeting recalls Costolo arguing, while Stricker reportedly compared Costolo’s takedown of undesirable content to deleting the Zapruder film after objections from the Kennedy family. Ultimately, the meeting ended with the group deciding to carve out policy exceptions to keep up grisly content for newsworthiness, according to one person present. Though Stricker and Gadde won, one source described a frustrated Costolo leaving in disagreement. “I think if you guys have your way the only people using Twitter will be ISIS and the ACLU,” Costolo said, according to this person.
This is the core of the problem - not anonymity and free speech itself, but a gross fetishization of it, which blinds people to the actual problems going on.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:10 AM on December 23, 2016 [3 favorites]
Because it is built to prevent the changes that would fix those things, thanks to a bunch of free speech fetishists. When the prior CEO tried to delete ISIS beheading video tweets, well...
Weeks later, when a rash of beheading videos appeared, Costolo gave similar takedown orders, causing Twitter’s free speech advocates, Gabriel Stricker and Vijaya Gadde, to call an emergency policy meeting.
Inside the meeting, attended by Costolo, Stricker, Gadde, and product head Kevin Weil (now Instagram’s product lead) and first reported by BuzzFeed News, tensions rose as Costolo’s desire to build a more palatable network that was marketable and ultimately attractive to new users clashed with Stricker and Gadde’s desire for radically free expression.
“You really think we should have videos of people being murdered?” someone who attended the meeting recalls Costolo arguing, while Stricker reportedly compared Costolo’s takedown of undesirable content to deleting the Zapruder film after objections from the Kennedy family. Ultimately, the meeting ended with the group deciding to carve out policy exceptions to keep up grisly content for newsworthiness, according to one person present. Though Stricker and Gadde won, one source described a frustrated Costolo leaving in disagreement. “I think if you guys have your way the only people using Twitter will be ISIS and the ACLU,” Costolo said, according to this person.
This is the core of the problem - not anonymity and free speech itself, but a gross fetishization of it, which blinds people to the actual problems going on.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:10 AM on December 23, 2016 [3 favorites]
Twitter's "problem" boils down to a bigger question: should everything that exists as a more-or-less autonomous zone be constrained?
posted by rhizome at 12:09 PM on December 23, 2016
posted by rhizome at 12:09 PM on December 23, 2016
HOW ON EARTH IS TWITTER STILL A THING!? The fact that it continues to exist in its current form defies all logic.
Well for what it's worth, it won't exist for very much longer. I give it maybe two years at the outside before it collapses.
Of course that will leave us with what? Facebook? Tumblr? Instagram? G+ is dead and gone a year ago. No, shut up, it IS gone. All you Twitter folk don't even think about going over there when Twitter's gone.
posted by happyroach at 1:56 PM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well for what it's worth, it won't exist for very much longer. I give it maybe two years at the outside before it collapses.
Of course that will leave us with what? Facebook? Tumblr? Instagram? G+ is dead and gone a year ago. No, shut up, it IS gone. All you Twitter folk don't even think about going over there when Twitter's gone.
posted by happyroach at 1:56 PM on December 23, 2016 [1 favorite]
Twitter's "problem" boils down to a bigger question: should everything that exists as a more-or-less autonomous zone be constrained?
Well come on. Doesn't it boil down more to the question of whether (or rather: how) Twitter should be constrained? I am not of the opinion that everything should be but some places certainly should do a better job in defined ways.
I have come to think some of the problems people have with Twitter are fundamentally more difficult to solve than the company is given credit for. In a MeFi discussion about Twitter a while ago somebody complained about replies to public figures being cluttered with "randos," and I thought - wait a minute, isn't that half the appeal? That you or I can jump in and respond to Kanye West or argue with Matt Yglesias or whatever? Yeah, it turns out that when you invite the public in a lot of the public sucks but still I have much less interest in Twitter as a broadcast medium than as an interactive medium. Or - I think a major underlying factor that makes Twitter feel like a hostile environment is the way it blurs the line between talking about someone (or about their tweet) with talking to them. But that's an absolutely core part of the design of the service! What do you do about it?
On the other hand there are tons of examples of Twitter just being terrible at responding to specific issues and specific destructive actors. Like in the OP, or like - why is fucking Mike Cernovich still around?
posted by atoxyl at 2:28 PM on December 23, 2016 [4 favorites]
Well come on. Doesn't it boil down more to the question of whether (or rather: how) Twitter should be constrained? I am not of the opinion that everything should be but some places certainly should do a better job in defined ways.
I have come to think some of the problems people have with Twitter are fundamentally more difficult to solve than the company is given credit for. In a MeFi discussion about Twitter a while ago somebody complained about replies to public figures being cluttered with "randos," and I thought - wait a minute, isn't that half the appeal? That you or I can jump in and respond to Kanye West or argue with Matt Yglesias or whatever? Yeah, it turns out that when you invite the public in a lot of the public sucks but still I have much less interest in Twitter as a broadcast medium than as an interactive medium. Or - I think a major underlying factor that makes Twitter feel like a hostile environment is the way it blurs the line between talking about someone (or about their tweet) with talking to them. But that's an absolutely core part of the design of the service! What do you do about it?
On the other hand there are tons of examples of Twitter just being terrible at responding to specific issues and specific destructive actors. Like in the OP, or like - why is fucking Mike Cernovich still around?
posted by atoxyl at 2:28 PM on December 23, 2016 [4 favorites]
Felix Biederman owns, and CTH is the best thing to hit US political commentary in my lifetime.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:23 PM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:23 PM on December 23, 2016 [2 favorites]
I have come to think some of the problems people have with Twitter are fundamentally more difficult to solve than the company is given credit for.
Except that they really aren't. Twitter's major problem is that they are unwilling to really address abuse on their service, and the reasons for that appear to be more ideological than technical. It shouldn't take the pressure of a major corporation to have an abusive individual removed from the service. And the reason that happens is because there's a significant cadre of free speech fetishists who seem to think that moderation is the first step on the slippery slope to tyranny.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:58 PM on December 28, 2016
Except that they really aren't. Twitter's major problem is that they are unwilling to really address abuse on their service, and the reasons for that appear to be more ideological than technical. It shouldn't take the pressure of a major corporation to have an abusive individual removed from the service. And the reason that happens is because there's a significant cadre of free speech fetishists who seem to think that moderation is the first step on the slippery slope to tyranny.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:58 PM on December 28, 2016
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