Twitter’s been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. They’ve seen a healthy amount of criticism regarding their terribly inconsistent enforcement of harassment policies, which often punish and suspend all the wrong people while at the same time allowing known harassers to run rampant throughout their system. Enter: the @TrustySupport parody account.
The novelty account poked fun at Twitter’s terrible enforcement, often telling users to send themselves Twitter’s canned harassment report responses. The account also made “announcements” about things like how your Twitter account now comes with free abuse and how “might means right.” Because of course it does.
Some users are currently experiencing harassment and abuse on @Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are not working towards a resolution.
— Trusty Support (@TrustySupport) February 4, 2016
Remember, mob harassment should be able to silence anyone. Might means right. Abusers have the right to a public account, you don’t! 🚧
— Trusty Support (@TrustySupport) February 4, 2016
The irony here is that the @TrustySupport account was suspended for an hour because I really don’t think Twitter knows what the hell it’s doing with its policies. So I mean… harassers and abusers run rampant, and the novelty account criticizing the ones in power is the one that gets the punishment. Ha ha, okay, Twitter.
But wait, it gets better.
BoingBoing shared the story of Alison Leiby, a comedienne, shared a pretty cutting tweet related to women’s rights and gun control in the middle of December last year.
As a woman, I just hope that one day I have as many rights as a gun does.
— Alison Leiby (@AlisonLeiby) December 17, 2015
Nice, right? Apparently a bunch of conservative buttholes didn’t think so. Of course, they went on to do what buttholes do: spewed shit all over her feed. They started with the “traditional harassment” (wow is there such a thing), using mean, abusive language to fuck up her mentions. But it didn’t stop there. After a sustained campaign of buttholery, the sentient poopsocks started tweeting rape threats, threatening to “lock her in the closet” when they were “done with her.”
Last Monday evening, however, the replies went from annoying and insulting to violent and threatening. Men were replying to me and taking my joke to a horrific, new place. Some said they wanted to ban me from public places and silence me. Others said they wanted to lock me in their closet when they’re done with me. A few choice gentlemen suggested I, like their gun, have a “rough brush clean my holes.” If you want a tour of how hateful and negative humanity can be about women, just scroll through the replies to my original joke. It’s kind of like the It’s A Small World ride, but instead of different countries you just see different expressions of misogyny.
Leiby’s tweet is still up, as you can see above, and so are the horrendous replies.
Twitter is god awful. There are fewer and fewer things that make staying on that platform worthwhile. A leaked API data report shows that the overall number of tweets has been in a steady decline since August 2014, demonstrating that people might be slowly coming to realize how much of a greasy tire fire Twitter can be.
Despite Twitter’s denial of the report, and their statement that it’s somehow wildly inaccurate, its spotty-at-best track history around enforcement of harassment policies shows us enough: that Twitter just does not give a shit about abuse.
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