2 min read
There could be no clearer demonstration of the seriousness with which Twitter regards antisemitism than its response over the past two weeks to the JC's attempts to elicit answers to a series of basic questions following the abuse of Luciana Berger.
There has been no response. Nothing.
Twitter is a cesspit of hate. Last week we revealed that Ms Berger was the victim of a co-ordinated attack by a neo-Nazi website. But for every such planned operation, there are many more less coordinated attacks - individual antisemitic tweets that many users of Twitter soon discover come with the territory.
In its self-serving statement to the Community Security Trust, Twitter claims that "abusive behaviour is not tolerated on our platform" and trumpets its "cross-functional task force dedicated to putting the full force of Twitter's innovative capabilities towards user safety".
Rarely can there have been a more ludicrous piece of corporate spin. It takes barely a minute looking at Twitter and the constant stream of hate to see that whatever it now may be doing to combat abuse, it is not doing enough.
It is plain wrong to say that "abusive behaviour is not tolerated on our platform"; abusive behaviour is par for the course.
The abuse directed at Ms Berger may have been vile but it was qualitatively no worse than many other users of Twitter regularly experience.
Not that Twitter is alone. Facebook, too, houses pages which have no place in the modern world. It argues that it complies with the law of the land where it operates. But the law is not the point. Illegal posts and tweets can be dealt with - in theory - through the criminal justice system. The issue is not legality but decency. And it is pure sophistry to argue that free speech compels these corporations to permit the expression of all sorts of unsavoury views. It does not. It is a choice. For whatever reason, Twitter refuses to spend the necessary money or commit the necessary resources to, for instance, create an algorithm that would tackle such abuse as it is posted.
Twitter makes a virtue of being purely reactive. It says that when it is alerted to abuse, it acts. But even if one leaves aside the wholly unsatisfactory criteria by which it decides if a tweet is abusive, that itself confirms that a choice has been made to permit abuse to be posted prior to action being taken.
And even on its own terms, Twitter's response to reports of abuse is shameful. It says, matter of factly, that it takes 72 hours for a response. 72 hours? The whole point of platforms such as Twitter is their immediacy. 72 hours is a lifetime on social media.
These companies repeat ad nauseam the mantra that hundreds of millions of communications pass through their platforms every week, as if the rest of us should be grateful for what little they do manage to deal with.
But the measures they do take are little more than a sop - a sideshow and distraction from their modus operandi, which is to facilitate as much traffic as they can while taking as little moral, legal or technical responsibility as possible.
Remember the next time you see abuse on Twitter and Facebook, that this is a choice made by the companies: a choice not to do what it takes to stop it.