So the bullies won at least part of their war with Caroline Criado-Perez – she got a new wave of hahaha rape-threats, so she deleted her Twitter account.
Caroline Criado-Perez, who led the campaign to reinstate a woman on an English banknote, took to Twitter on Thursday to vent frustration at the police’s apparent loss of information related to previous death and rape threats, which Scotland Yard has since denied.
The journalist deleted her account after receiving further threats on the site in recent days.
Bullies win, everyone else loses.
The report abuse button is not much use when someone is being targeted like CCP, how can she individually reports 10’s/100’s of people and tweets? It would be exhausting. If you report a tweet or a tweep to Twitter and they didn’t target you the response is to get the person being bullied to submit the report or they’ll ignore it. Either this needs to change or they need better solutions.
I have had the highly dubious pleasure of interacting with some of her haters on Twitter in the last few days. Here’s just a tiny sample of the charming people who have been hijacking the #wesupportCCP hashtag over the last two nights (TW: misogyny, violence against women and rape)
@Bjarte, recognise a few, they are in with the “#CuntSec” lulz troll crew who attacked her first time around. They proceeded to DoS my website for blocking them…. Mini-anon h4x0rs with a lot of misogynistic tendencies.
I think the bullies making the threats should get community service at the very least, if not county jail time.
IOW, script kiddies that wear V for Vendetta masks, are impotent chimps politically, love to wave anarchist flags randomly at political protests that don’t really do anything, think they’re amazing with a script someone else wrote, and attack us online with rape threats or attack other minorities because they think the big bad government is conspiring to prevent them from being assholes online. The Big Bad Government should conspire to prevent them from harassing people online, and their antics are just more mysog behavior reinforcing the very patriarchial status quo.
If Twitter don’t get to grips with this, it will be left with only angry people and bullies. It’s a bit like a club which has a few people who enjoy abusing other patrons but are not thrown out by the manager. All it needs is someone to open a competing club with rules enforced by staff and a lot of people will go there instead.
Agreed with Jessie @5
Bjarte, I know, it’s via your interactions that I learned she’d left Twitter.
unpossible.
twitter is too big to control in such a fashion now. It will burn before there is any systematic control put into place. Indeed, it will become the haunt of the angry and the wanna be powerful blowhards.
It’s inevitable.
On the bright side, just like with most popular forums that end up the same way, there will also just as inevitably be something to replace it.
So… what’s for post-Twitter?
@Ophelia @oolon
And now I feel like surgically cutting out those parts of my brain where those images are stored.
I tend to agree that there is no plausible way for Twitter to deal with this problem when it gets to a certain level. What solutions are there? Any more restrictive platform would be self-defeating. It is the anarchy and openness of Twitter that makes it attractive.
Luckily she hasn’t left twitter for good. This just in:
I actually knew this since I read her explanation before it was deleted. For me, however, the most moving part of the blog post, is her account of why she left:
I found this part especially gripping:
Seriously, if I didn’t want to be on Twitter before, now I think it needs active shunning. Sucks for people who’ve liked the format/medium, though. :/