I thought that if I left Twitter, I could find a new social network that would give it some competition (Twitter’s monopoly on the social space is a big reason it can ignore people who are abused and harassed, while punishing people for reporting their attackers), so I fired up this account I made at Mastodon a long time ago.
I thought I’d find something different. I thought I’d find a smaller community that was more like Twitter was way back in 2008 or 2009. Cat pictures! Jokes! Links to interesting things that we found in the backwaters of the internet! Interaction with friends we just haven’t met, yet! What I found was… not that.
I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go fuck yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.
Wil Wheaton
I’m very behind with the articles I plan to share on my blog, but hopefully the upcoming month will allow me to catch up a bit.
Anyway, a month ago (which is equivalent to roughly a century in Twitter years), there was a brief protest movement on Twitter over their slow reaction to block Alex Jones and Infowars. People threatened to quit Twitter and move to Mastodon, one of the recent wannabe micro-blogging sites. Not surprisingly, some found the medium just as toxic as Twitter, if not more. This just goes to show how difficult it is to maintain a healthy and safe environment in public, while interacting with people from all over the world under anonymous identities (not to mention bots, but I assume Mastodon is too small to have that problem yet). Many of the cases when Twitter does act are enforced by legislation (as it’s the case in Germany with blocking far-right propaganda), so the best way to improve social media is not to quit or to take your chances on another site, but to demand better regulation of online spaces. As with GDPR, smarter regulation from one part of the world could eventually influence platforms to adopt it for their entire user base.
Twitter's online speech norms were created and shaped by lawyers who were deeply knowledgeable of existing First Amendment case law in the U.S. It feels like journalists now want platforms to intentionally deviate from that: https://t.co/e9XLJMCHxY https://t.co/kkdSBSqaHK
— Kim-Mai Cutler (@kimmaicutler) August 15, 2018
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