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Practical ways to reduce online harassment Lyrics by John “TotalBiscuit” Bain

2014

Through painstaking research I have determined that shouting at trolls does not make them go away and that hashtags and slacktivism have not managed to eliminate online harassment. We've been dealing with harassment for many years, even before the Youtube thing became a career and in the experience of myself and our staff, here are a few things that social media sites could implement to give greater control to the end-user to protect themselves from trolls while simultaneously not infringing on free-speech rights.
1) An "account age" configurable filter. This is something we have trialed to great success on our subreddit. Reddit has a problem in that its too easy to create burner accounts and use them to troll and harass people. However, Reddit like pretty much any other social media site tracks the age of an account. We configured an auto-moderator bot to spam-filter any comment left by someone with an account that was created less than 7 days before the post. We then let people know in the rules that their account needed to be a week old before posting. This cut trolling down to almost zero and those that chose to do it anyway were easily blocked and couldn't simply re-register with another account and continue. Naturally there are downsides to this solution. People who just registered and want to talk to you immediately can't. I'd suggest making this filter optional and configurable. Let users choose how long they want an account to be open for before they see their @replies. Some may find that a couple of hours is enough, others may desire a longer filter. That's up to them. After all it is peoples right not to listen if they don't want to, but it's impossible to un-read something after it's been sent, so blocking is not necessarily enough.
2) The ability to disable the public display of @replies under your tweet and/or the ability to remove specific @replies from those publicly shown. This becomes more important the more followers you have. Those engaging in harassment will reply to your tweets in the hope of having their reply appear below it on the twitter page. Twitter only displays a certain number of replies, what determines that I'm not sure, it's probably only the first X tweets (though I've also seen it remove those tweets later on in favour of tweets involving @replies to multiple people, I'm not sure how this works). Blocking does not stop this from happening, though it will stop the account owner from seeing the @replies in his/her feed, it will not prevent others from reading them or seeing them under the original tweet on the Twitter website. Trolls are looking for attention and those with large fanbases are natural targets since those fans will often engage with the troll to defend their chosen personality. This makes the situation worse as it feeds the troll.
3) The ability to add moderators to your Twitter account that have the ability to block and remove tweets, but not necessarily post. This would be useful for those with larger followings but could even be handy for those who just want to let a friend help keep their twitter feed clean. On Twitter its very easy to feel like the world is shouting at you and it's overwhelming. Giving the ability for people to help moderate that constant flow of communication would be helpful.
4) The ability to simply turn off @replies. This is a simple one. It's a nuclear option really but it would be nice to have anyway. Twitter is important for many people because it's a way to get information out to a wide audience fast. Many businesses and independent creators have become dependent on it for that but with it comes baggage that they shouldn't necessarily have to deal with if they don't want to.
These are practical options that would help. I can't solve the eons-old problem of humans being dicks to each other but we at the very least might be able to filter some of that out.
Credits
John “TotalBiscuit” Bain

John “TotalBiscuit” Bain

About “Practical ways to reduce online harassment” by John “TotalBiscuit” Bain

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