This post was killed by a large number of user flags.
I think we need to see this story in its proper perspective here.
Yes, this woman received unacceptable messages via twitter. Yes, there need to be mechanisms to deal with it.
However, from her Twitter history you can clearly see she was online into the early hours stoking the trolls, fanning the flames.
She DM'd some random Twitter employee until he got fed up with her and made his tweets private.
She even @-mentioned Barack Obama, asking him to intervene. Seriously.
She claims that she successfully forced the Bank of England to change the design of a new banknote so that a woman appeared on it. Even though there has previously been a banknote featuring a woman; and every single item of UK currency has a woman on it (the Queen).
Her strategy to seek attention by using Twitter's name is win-win. If they change their policy, she was successful and claims credit. If they don't, she can keep bashing them using their high profile name to attract attention.
Would it be that difficult to add in an 'Abusive Off' feature? You can just flick it off and any tweets containing blacklisted words vanish.
Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people who are obscenity averse might like to enable it too. Heck, I might even enable it myself when reading the activity on some hashtags.
This is one (sad) illustration of how Twitter is so unique a communication service, because of its particular access-control details. The fact that it's so hard to block/stop abusers is a consequence of the way Twitter leaves communications "open" and loose...with Facebook, you can't stalk/directly-abuse someone without them giving you some access (or revoking Facebook's default access). With email, you can target an address, but you can't read what's sent from it unless you're an addressee...Twitter is an open river for people to sample, and piss into. One of the things that the OP rips Twitter on is actually kind of a nuanced issue, IIRC. Twitter removed the "block" because "blocking" someone gave the blocker a false sense of security...you can never hide your activity from a stalker who simply logs out and views your public timeline.
"Block" effectively does nothing...what Twitter should've done is label the button something like "Ignore"...which would allow you to never be notified when that user sends a direct reply or mentions you...but would not have the same connotation as actively blocking that person in the way that a restraining order "blocks" someone.
As much as Twitter is seen as a superficial surface, nothing more than a dumbed-down micro version of blogging...the technicalities that underly its open nature is something that is hard to grok until you actively use it. I remember the "aha" moment for me was reading the report of when Demi Moore, an early Twitter celebrity, responded to a random person's suicide threat...just sending someone famous such a message would be impossible on Facebook, and pretty difficult on email (even if you knew the address, people/spam-systems are trained to filter such random messages out)...but in Twitter's early days, you had a decent chance of your crazy message being seen by just about anybody. That's the magic/insanity of Twitter for you.
I could imagine a designer at twitter not being aware of why this feature is so important and removing it, but not why they don't make a public response of some kind.
Does anyone know anything about the change control for the UI features at twitter?
Is there a good reason why CCP continues to even use Twitter in the face of all this abuse? I'm not suggesting that the assaulters are in any way justified in what they're doing, but leaving Twitter and finding different ways to communicate with people seems like an obvious solution to the problem.
Maybe it's harder for me to grok as someone who never really got into Twitter in the first place.
Was there ever a murder/rape threat on Twitter, which was followed through?
that a big relief
1 hour, 28 points and it's on the second page. Is this story flagged or penalized? If so, such a shame.
It's like shouting in a crowded theater. Only this theater is about the size of the globe and the audience is incapable of distinguishing between a joke and a real threat so everything is looked at in the worst possible way.
Internet communications are hard, tone-of-voice is meta information that we jokingly try to add with <sarcasm> and <jk> tags but when those are omitted real trouble can ensue.
Anonymous threats are rarely worth the value of the medium used for their conveyance.
Hey, could we just all agree in advance to not discuss the unnecessarily misleading statements, and probably turn a blind eye to the rest of the somewhat over-the-top stuff too?
I'm not clear from this post if there was any contact with Twitter to discuss why the feature in question had been removed. That would always seem like a first step to take. In addition, it seems pretty clear that it's twitter "bug" (https://twitter.com/safety/status/465797191869554688) — realistically, probably a change that nobody thought about or noticed, rather than an actual bug.
Many of those tweets contain direct threats of violence. They need to be reported to law enforcement, not flagged for Twitter to deal with.
Also, it seems unusual to hold Twitter responsible for their users' speech. UI tweaks may reduce the amount of hatred seen, but they are not going to solve this problem.
Lastly, I spent some time perusing other posts on this blog. They are not furthering any discussion, to put it mildly. Likewise, I doubt the comments here will generate much light. It's a sad situation, but I don't think HN has much to contribute.