“Honeypot for assholes” is accurate, but probably didn’t make it past Twitter’s marketing department

Buzzfeed has been generating some genuinely informative articles lately — it’s become much more than a clickbait site. This article on Twitter’s colossal failure to police itself is a great example. Twitter has had this ongoing harassment problem practically since its founding, the founders knew it, and they have done nothing about it.

By March 2008, exhausted and disillusioned by a torrent of tweets calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and publicizing personal information like her email address, Waldman reached out to Twitter again, this time to the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. After a series of phone calls to the company went nowhere, Dorsey and Twitter went silent. So in May, Waldman went public, detailing her ordeal in a blog post, which caught fire in media circles.

Twitter, then still a startup, was fresh off a buzzy SXSW debut, and Waldman’s post was an unfamiliar bit of bad press, depicting Dorsey in particular as an unsympathetic, even cowardly, chief executive. “Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it,” Waldman wrote. While Twitter founder Biz Stone issued a formal acknowledgment of the problem, arguing that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content,” Dorsey was silent. Co-founder Ev Williams was more critical, posting tweets that cast doubt on Waldman’s claims and halfheartedly apologizing with a simple “our bad.”

…

More than eight years after Waldman’s ordeal, harassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” So much so that numerous high-profile users have quit the service, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a barrage of racist comments and death threats, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself. Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “horrific and racially charged” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.

Part of this problem is a gross ideological commitment to “free speech” — which isn’t really what anyone means by free speech. It ought to mean a commitment to refusing to favor one political or social position over any other, but instead, it’s become about allowing anyone to vomit shit freely, everywhere, so that raw useless noise dominates over any signal. Dogmatic free speech purists actually diminish the availability of free speech by prioritizing the protection of garbage over information and even friendly discussion. And it clearly is a weird philosophical absolutism by a few of the founders.

This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which have always banned content and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the Just Not Sports podcast posted video of sports fans reading a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.

Every useful medium has limitations on what can be said. Your local newspaper will not freely post letters to the editor that contain the kinds of sexual and racist slurs that I get every day on Twitter. There are always limits. They are necessary to maintain the utility of the communication channel. You would think an organization that is solely dedicated to promoting communication would understand this.

But here’s another clue about what makes them so oblivious.

Looking back on Twitter’s early years, multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern. “The original sin is a homogenous leadership,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color.”

I predict that the white men behind Twitter also have a number of Libertarian twits with a sophomoric, privileged view of the world.

Another revelation is that Twitter has automated filtering tools to block out the worst sorts of trolls, and that these were deployed to the benefit of Barack Obama and Caitlyn Jenner when they did a Q&A on the medium. They aren’t perfect — they never are, and trolls will evolve their behavior to evade filtering — but it isn’t clear why they only provide this benefit for a tiny number of celebrities. I would love to have such a service switched on for me. Ariel Waldman probably would, too.

Waldman, like every single one of the dozen people interviewed for this story, stressed that she loved Twitter; that when it works as it should, it’s empowering, exciting, even life-changing. But, like almost every participant in this story, Waldman’s voice grew tired while making excuses for Twitter’s shortcomings. “I mean, the thing is that it’s just getting to that point where it’s become such an exhausting service to use,” she said with a heavy sigh. “That blocking 20 awful people every day has to be a part of my logistical reality — even when I’m not seeking abuse out. It’s just — it feels like so much work to use Twitter, and that should be a real red flag. They’ve clearly showed they don’t want to make abuse a priority.

“It’s like, who would reasonably want to use a service that does this to you?”

So far today, I’ve only blocked two obnoxious trolls, which is a light day (who knows, though, it’s still early). But she’s asked a good question: why do I have to chop through so much dead wood every day just to use their simple service?

I get email — theistic tears edition

cryingjesus

This one guy keeps sending me faux-sincere emails asking me to confirm that atheism is in trouble.

Dear Mr. Myers,

Recent reports point to British atheism being in trouble.

With atheism faltering in Britain, is American atheism headed for trouble?

Sincerely,

Paul

He only sends me links to two blogs, one titled “Examining Atheism” and the other called “Combatting Atheism”, which sound exactly the same, and are almost certainly also written by my very concerned correspondent. The kinds of ‘evidence’ he uses to show that atheism is doomed are the number of google searches for the word “atheism”, the number of immigrants to Great Britain, the publication of yet more apologetics from the likes of the tiresome Lennox and McGrath, and — get this — Ray Comfort’s new movie, The Atheist Delusion. It’s pathetic, wishful thinking on his part, nothing more, and the insincerity of his polite requests suggest nothing but dishonesty on his part. But sure, I’ll answer his question.

No.

I would make two general explanations of that answer.

One is that we are seeing a shake-up within the atheist movement — there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the kind of atheism that is easy to measure with the crude metrics my correspondent wants to use. Let’s call it “Charismatic Atheism”, where people happily embrace the points of view offered by “thought leaders” like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, often without doing much thinking for themselves. That is a legitimate gateway into atheist ideas, and had a surge of success in the 2000s. It was a way to bring in a strong cohort of people who were quite open about saying that they were atheists.

But it’s not a long-lasting effect, and it’s actually antithetical to the strengths of atheism, which ought to be freethought, evidence-based thinking, and self-criticism. Hero worship is the path to orthodoxy and dogma. So while I might like Hitchens personally, and find many of his ideas worthy and beautifully expressed, I also consider him entirely wrong on some other ideas. Meanwhile, there are some atheists who practically worship the guy, use photos of Hitchens as avatars, and get very irate if you point out that he was also a war-mongering neocon. That represents a split within the movement, and demonstrates a growing dissent. We also see a lot of authoritarian atheists, for instance, or nonegalitarian atheists who despise feminism, and a robust atheism will not simply hide these significant conflicts in the name of protecting the idea that there is no god as dogma. But that’s all good. Atheism is not the kind of monolothic institution that, for instance, the Catholic church is, or other churches try to be, and that is exactly the way it should be.

For many people, atheism has become something we take for granted, and is not the primary cause we struggle to advance. There are other, more important battles to be fought. The label is less important than the body of secular ideals, and the failure of religion to recognize secular goals. More atheists are openly embracing humanism, especially in Britain, where the BHA is very successful.

Which brings me to my second explanation: that you’re finding fewer google searches for the word “atheism” (as if that is even a useful metric) does not change the fact that religion has failed to provide one word of truth, and that the defense of religious belief has collapsed into absurdist irrelevance. If you are citing Ray Comfort, or Kent Hovind, or Ken Ham to support your ideas, you’ve lost — they’re people who actively promote counterfactual nonsense. I see a lot of desperation for affirmation in Paul’s sad little letters, not confidence. That’s where I like to see believers, weak in their faith and grasping at straws.

Nowhere in Paul’s blogs does he present a speck of evidence for theism. He just whines endlessly about atheism, and he can’t even muster any substantive criticisms of atheist thought — it’s solely about how he thinks atheism is becoming less popular. That is not evidence that theism is correct. If I was the last person on Earth calling themself an atheist, it would not make any difference at all in the validity of that mish-mash of bullshit called Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism.

He can keep sending me his emails, though. His irrationality and desperation only serve to make me stronger.

Only mostly dead

Sometimes, New Scientist puts a strange twist on their stories — like this one, Universal ancestor of all life on Earth was only half alive. I got stuck on just the title. “Half alive”? What does that mean? It’s describing a paper that did a comparative analysis of genes found in 1800 bacteria and 130 archaea to identify what was common between them, which would suggest what genes were present in the last universal common ancestor.

Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed.

“It was flabbergasting to us that we found as many as we did,” says William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, who led the study. The findings support the idea that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lurked in hydrothermal vents where hot water rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide and minerals emerged from the sea floor.

“It’s spot on with regard to the hydrothermal vent theory,” Martin says. He describes LUCA as half-living, because it may have depended on abiotic reactions in the vents to produce many of the chemicals it needed.

That last bit is where they lost me. I’m about 0.4% salt, which is abiotically derived…does that mean I’m only 99.6% alive? And what about water? I’m 60% water, which means I’m now 39.6% alive, or mostly dead. If you’re just talking about chemical reactions, I don’t have an autonomous power source, but rely on daily input of organic material produced by other living creatures. So by that definition, I am a mostly dead, or undead, zombie PZ that lives by ghoulishly feasting upon the bodies of the living.

When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.

But I think what is messing us up here is a continuing bias towards vitalism — there is no distinction between “life” and “chemistry”. If you just accept that, we’ll all stop wasting our time trying to figure out what part of our biology is life vs. not-life. This video is a nice simplified approach to the problem of the origin of life, but it also seems hung up on a pointless distinction between “dead chemicals” and “living cells”.

At least the story does make the case for the increasingly dominant hypothesis for the origin of life on earth — that it came from reactions that exploited electron gradients found at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP.

That fits in beautifully with the idea that the first life got its energy from the natural gradient between vent water and seawater, and so was bound to these vents. Only later did the ability to generate gradients evolve, allowing life to break away from the vents on at least two occasions – one giving rise to the first archaea, the other to bacteria.

Please, please go Galt again

Jason Lewis was a conservative talk radio host in Minneapolis, and a couple of years ago he quit, on air (most likely this was totally staged — his colleagues weren’t particularly convincing actors, and for people shocked about his abrupt departure, they sure spend a lot of time plugging his new website). This is his very Libertarian on-air announcement.

He’s an amazing jerk. He’s so Libertarian, he doesn’t see a problem with slavery.

In 2009, Lewis complained that “real Americans” believe Hurricane Katrina victims were “a bunch of whiners.” Last year he claimed, “the median income for blacks in America would make them rich in most African nations, not most – all.” He went on to argue that the United States government lacks the authority to outlaw slavery.”

“In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me?” Lewis said in an audio commentary added to his book Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States’ Rights. “It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say, ‘Well, if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t?’ Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.”

It’s rare to see a Libertarian quite so open about the fact that his philosophy is entirely “ME ME ME” and not at all about individual human liberty, since he doesn’t even consider the rights of the slaves. It’s very nice that if he disagrees with slavery, he just won’t own one…but what if he agrees with slavery, but his slave doesn’t?

Well, he’s come back from Galt’s Gulch to run for congress, and has actually won the Republican primary in Minnesota’s 6th district. We know you all miss Michele Bachman, so there’s a chance he’ll be there in congress to make Minnesota look just as ridiculous.

He’ll be running against Democrat Angie Craig in November. A woman. This could be interesting, considering what Jason Lewis thinks of women.

I never thought in my lifetime where’d you have so many single, or I should say, yeah single women who would vote on the issue of somebody else buying their diaphragm. This is a country in crisis. Those women are ignorant in, I mean, the most generic way. I don’t mean that to be a pejorative. They are simply ignorant of the important issues in life. Somebody’s got to educate them.

There’s something about young, single women where they’re behaving like Stepford wives. They walk in lock step – is that really the most important thing to a 25-year old unmarried woman – uh getting me to pay for her pills? Seriously?! Is that what we’ve been reduced to? You can be bought off for that?

You’ve got a vast majority of young single women who couldn’t explain to you what GDP means. You know what they care about? They care about abortion. They care about abortion and gay marriage. They care about ‘The View.’ They are non-thinking.

Sadly, it looks like it’ll be a close race, when it shouldn’t be.

Zika and political obstructionism

Maki Naro has a very good overview of the Zika virus in comic form.

naro-zika-2c

naro-zika-3a

The effects of the virus are actually easy to understand: mild, flu-like symptoms in adults, but a significant chance of debilitating brain damage to developing fetuses. You don’t want to get Zika because it’s unpleasant and nasty, but your fetus must be protected from it because it’s devastating.

Unfortunately, the USA has a dysfunctional congress that can’t respond to serious problems anymore. An effort to dedicate money (to the tune of almost two billion dollars) to preventing the spread of the disease was killed because Republicans loaded it with irrelevant, poisonous addenda — baggage to snipe at Planned Parenthood (an organization that is vital to putting together a response) or to allow Confederate flags to fly, for instance.

But especially unfortunately, diseases that cause birth defects are a vector for the pro-life-at-any-cost fanatics to gallop in and wreck any process with their delusional antics. We are supposed to love that tiny slug of human fetal tissue so much that we’ll defy any attempt to combat a virus that will poison its nervous system, and don’t you dare think about abortions. A fetal slug with a deformed, shriveled brain is still to be regarded as a full human person!

If you think I’m making this up, listen to Marco Rubio.

Obviously, microcephaly is a terrible prenatal condition that kids are born with. And when they are, it’s a lifetime of difficulties. So I get it.

I’m not pretending to you that that’s an easy question you asked me. But I’m pro-life. And I’m strongly pro-life. I believe all human life should be protected by our law, irrespective of the circumstances or condition of that life.

No, he doesn’t get it. He’s lying.

He also doesn’t believe in protecting life, because he’s also in favor of the death penalty, and in fact thinks the big problem with capital punishment is that we don’t shuffle the condemned into the death machine fast enough.

zikacuts

Meanwhile, Donald Trump thinks we have Zika under control, and is praising Florida governor Rick Scott for how he’s handling it. His little PR helpers are arguing for inaction because birth defects are nothing new.

The United States has been paralyzed by the Republican virus. They know nothing, they do nothing, and they actively interfere with necessary responses to problems. We need to do something about that. Never vote for any Republican, ever.

Dangerous times

This long list (taken from The Atlantic) is a collection of prominent Republicans who have endorsed Donald Trump for president. That they’ve done so already speaks poorly of their character.

Bob Dole
John Boehner
Trent Lott
Dick Cheney
Newt Gingrich
Reince Priebus
Rick Perry
Mike Huckabee
Bobby Jindal
Eric Cantor
Ben Carson
Rick Santorum
Herman Cain
Paul Ryan
Kevin McCarthy
Steve Scalise
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
Raul Labrador
Mitch McConnell
Jeff Sessions
John McCain
Kelly Ayotte
Rand Paul
Marco Rubio
Rob Portman
Richard Burr
Roy Blunt
Ron Johnson
Pat Toomey
Tom Cotton
Bob Corker
Orrin Hatch
Tim Scott
John Cornyn
Chris Christie
Paul LePage
Nikki Haley
Pete Ricketts
Mike Pence
Pat McCrory
Scott Walker
Donald Rumsfeld
Ann Coulter
Bill O’Reilly
Sean Hannity
Matt Drudge
Sarah Palin
Rush Limbaugh
Rupert Murdoch
Michael Reagan
Hugh Hewitt
Sheldon Adelson
Peter Thiel
Stanly Hubbard
T. Boone Pickens
Foster Friess
Woody Johnson
Mel Sembler
Jerry Falwell
Ralph Reed
James Dobson
Richard Land

Given Trump’s latest outrage — suggesting that assassination would be a possible way to prevent Hillary Clinton from appointing judges who would restrict gun ownership — it’s time for these people to do the right thing and renounce the man.

Not that I expect they will.

His behavior is beyond the pale. A demagogue has now broached the idea of murdering his democratic opponent to a mob of dangerous loons.

These loons.

I call that incitement to violence.

Oblivious Christians

One of those absurdly vile and perpetually smug Christians is complaining about the FFRF reminding a police department that they are a secular organization that is supposed to serve all citizens. The FFRF informed the police department of Oviedo, Florida that their awards ceremony violated the separation of church and state. This prompts this angry Christian to a rebuke.

The absurdly vile and perpetually smug Freedom From Religion Foundation claims to have just given a Florida police chief “constitutional lessons” following a clearly contentious departmental awards ceremony last month.

The offending event? It was an awards ceremony for officers, which just happened to be held in the multi-purpose building of a seminary.

Seriously. That’s it.

Oh, and because they actually dared to take two minutes out of an otherwise secular, non-religious ceremony to offer an invocation. Which is apparently all it takes to cause militant atheists’ heads to spin around and explode.

The police chief made a remarkably clueless excuse.

“Our Annual Awards Ceremony and Career Track Recognition was not held in a church,” Chudnow pointed out in his written response to FFRF. “Yes, the even was held at the Reformed Theological Seminary complex, but in a multi-purpose room and not a religious sanctuary.”

“Finally, as a practicing member of the Jewish faith, I was not offended by the invocation, nor did I receive any complaints from any attendees,” Chudnow added.

None of those excuses work.

  • So now a placed called “the Reformed Theological Seminary” is not a religious institution? That’s amazing. It’s about as silly as the argument that Christmas is a secular holiday (I’m fine with that, it just means we won the War on Christmas. Apparently, we’re also winning the war on Reformed Theological Seminaries.)

  • That one individual is not offended is irrelevant. You could find a member of the KKK who is not offended by burning a cross on someone’s lawn, too. The question is whether other people of a different faith (or no faith) would feel excluded or disinclined to participate in what should be a secular event because it was unnecessarily colored with religious overtones.

  • His last argument is particularly ridiculous. He is the boss. He has authority that can be misused. Of course people kept quiet.

    I’d also point out that anyone who objected to the religious nonsense would not have attended, and so would be in no position to complain.

I was actually most fascinated by the comments at that fanatically Christian site. Guess what they wanted to complain about?

The Muslims.

There’s nothing about Islam in the ceremony, nothing about Islam in the FFRF’s complaint, not even one word about Muslims in the bitter Christian’s diatribe…yet that’s what the commenters rave about.

CAN ANYONE TELL ME………

Do these secular demons ALSO go after Muslims…..

I’ve heard quite enough on the subject of Separation of church and state – a made-up agenda.

BUT HOW ABOUT SOME SEPARATION OF MOSQUE AND STATE……..those Muslims can do anything, anywhere. I don’t understand it.

If they’re just a religion, let’s subject them to the same strictures as Christians.

If they’re more than just religion, let’s not give them the protections of religion.

Bizarre. If Muslims possessed secular authority, and then tried to muddy it with religious rituals, of course the FFRF would be sending them polite letters and telling them to stop or their lawyers would spring into action. But here’s the thing: Muslims are a tiny minority in the USA. They don’t have the numbers to use their majority as an oppressive tool to compel non-Muslims to participate in their rituals. Christians do. They are subject to exactly the same restrictions as Christians — the problem is that Christians have an entitled status and regard any attempts to curtail their privilege to proselytize as unfair.

You know damn well what would happen to the Asstheists if they went after Islam…remember the beheadings on the beach? Or casting non-Islam believers (e.g., Asstheists) over into the ocean IN A LOCKED CELL?, or slitting throats? Yep…no asstheists need to bother getting after the the Muslims!

You knew that was coming. Did you know all Muslims believe in decapitation and throat slitting and murder and terrorism, and that atheists are afraid to criticize them? You probably didn’t, because it’s not true.

And here we go again…

Christians are just easier pickings because they don’t threaten to cut off your head. Muslims frequently irritate them.But when push comes to shove, Satan is the father of both. In all fairness, some Muslims are less radical and really would like to know God. They have just been taught lies about his nature and character. When they get radically saved they become the most awesome Christians.

No Muslim has ever threatened to cut off my head. But Christians regularly threaten my job, rage about expelling atheists from the country, and call me unAmerican. They even expect me to sit through their inappropriate religious ceremonies without complaint. I assure you that I personally feel far more threatened by Christianity than I do about any other religion, because Christianity has a huge amount of social and political power here.

The assumption that ‘converting the heathen’ is desirable is also exactly why the FFRF has to be diligent in checking the power of Christians in America, too.

Muzzies are the new protected minority for some sick reason. They will kill the lefties first.

Right. <Ethnic slur> is being treated too nicely! It’s OK to call them names and deny them the same rights Christians have, because they all want to kill us!

Yeesh. If only they had the ability to look in a mirror, maybe they’d realize why the FFRF needs to send out all these letters to smug Christians.