Update #1: I am looking for twitter employees to have a google hangout with about why this change has made marginalized people who use their service even less safe. If you are, or know someone who works at twitter, please email me.

Update #2: Twitter has changed their policy back to what is was before, but is not making positive changes toward preventing abuse or more responsibly handling abuse reports.


Twitter quietly made a change to their block policy today, taking away any of the benefits it had for people attempting to escape abuse and harassment. On top of that, users that were previously blocked can now immediately see all of the content of their victims.

In an article published in Forbes, Twitter gave some of their reasoning behind changing the block policy, including this gem:

“We saw antagonistic behavior where people would see they were blocked and be mad,” - Jim Prosser, Twitter spokesperson

This is dictating an abuse victim's safety based on how upset their abuser feels.

How Twitter's Old Block Policy Used To Work

Previously, a user would block an abuser and the following would happen:

  • blocker automatically unfollows abuser
  • blocker can no longer see abuser's tweets
  • abuser automatically unfollows blocker
  • abuser is unable to see tweets made by blocker
  • abuser is unable to retweet blocker's tweets

How Twitter's New Block Policy Works

Now, when a user blocks an abuser:

  • blocker automatically unfollows abuser
  • blocker can no longer see abuser's tweets

What Does This Mean?

This has, effectively, taken any of the teeth out being blocked by a user. What little protection blocking offered is now gone. Previously, blocking a user meant that they had to go out of their way to see your content and interact with you - either logging out completely or creating another account. Now, blocking effectively tells the blocker to close their eyes.

As someone who is routinely harassed, abused, and threatened on Twitter, this is terrifying. I, along with so many other cis + trans women, PoC, and other marginalized people who use the service, have followed twitters rules: block users, report the excessive cases, and hope that Twitter handles it. Twitter has not lived up to their end of the bargain. Any policies implemented have further harmed abused users or outright dismissed and ignored their safety concerns. Telling a user to make their account private to evade this abuse is victim blaming: it is putting the responsibility of safety on the abused without any accountability required from the abuser.

I personally have two stalkers on Twitter. I have blocked thousands of people over the course of my years on twitter for misogyny, homophobia, verbal harassment (both general and sexual), rape threats, and death threats. The idea that all of those users can now easily see my tweets, easily share them with their followers who are likely to be of the same ilk, and therefore have to deal with even larger waves of abuse is terrifying.

As soon as the block policy change news had circulated - less than twenty minutes - I have already had people I had previously blocked @replying me, rejoicing in the fact that they can see my content easily. Twenty minutes. 

I reported my concerns on Twitter and was immediately flooded with replies from people dismissing my privacy concerns. This is not something that people take seriously enough, it's not something that people fully understand how much it affects so many of us.

What I Need From You

This is not the first time that Twitter has made a change that has harmed abuse victims.

I am asking that if you know people who work at Twitter - especially those in a position to make a change - to connect me with them so I can speak with them over a google hangout. I don't believe that Twitter has listened to the voiced concerns of the users that experience harassment and abuse on an every day basis, as evidenced by both their creation of the report tweet button as well as their consistent dismissal of official reports made to Twitter through Support.

I don't believe that Twitter has had effective training at dealing with harassment and abuse. I don't believe they've responded to consistent reports from users that hasn't hurt those same users. 

I use Twitter daily and have been since 2007. If Twitter continues in this way, it will be abandoned by the users whose safety concerns have been continually ignored. 

Additional Reading

Quite regularly I'm asked about books that would be good to read to learn more about topics I discuss regularly, including intersectionality, feminism, womanism, and social justice. Thanks to the help of twitter and my ever-growing GoodReads list, here is a list for you. Many of the books can easily fit into more than one category, so may appear under multiple headings.

The list is comprised of both 101-level and some more advanced books on these subjects. Much of this is from an American cultural perspective. I haven't personally read all of them, but most I haven't read are on my to read list. If I've missed something you think is fundamental, please let me know

There are quite a few other topics I'd like to cover here, but I am going to consider this post a living document. I'm also trying to figure out the best way to distill this information into a more easily consumable list.

Note: Most links are through Amazon Affiliates, the funds from which help me buy books for research :)

Gender, Sex, and General Feminism, Womanism

Masculinity

Race and Ethnicity

Sexuality and Orientation

Ability

Language Dominance

Class and Labor

The Intersection of Difference and Technology

Domestic, Sexual, and Systemic Societal Violence, Rape Culture

American Exceptionalism, American Revisionist History

Prison Industrial Complex

General Anti-Oppression and Social Justice

Additional Resources

We've All Got a List

On a terrifyingly regular basis, incidents of bad behavior surface in the open source community. This can range from dismissiveness toward someone in a marginalized group, to outright hostility at conferences, to harassment and intimidation in the workplace, to physical violence and sexual assault in our community spaces. The scary thing here is that we only hear about them when they either happen in public or when the affected person comes forward, not all of them knowing what will happen when they do

If it does become public, I hear quite a few people say things like "I wish there were a list so I knew who to avoid/not hire/not allow at my events/etc".

What would a list accomplish?

The idea here being that a public blacklist would serve multiple purposes at once. Below are some of the reasons many people have told me they want something like this.

Note that these do not necessarily fall in line with my beliefs, but I am putting them all in one place because I hear them so frequently.

Consequences for Actions

Like many things on the internet, there are very few consequences for bad or threatening behavior. Part of this is due to the decentralization of a community caused by the internet - one feels more comfortable saying something to you online than to your face knowing that you can't immediately react and knowing that there would be little to no punishment for the behavior.

Another piece of the puzzle is the army of support someone who does this can gain from finding their way into the right parts of the internet - Hacker News, Reddit, 4chan, and other places where the idea of injustice has become perverted and festers in a village of people with access to all the right incendiary devices. In this way, the internet has actually been quite empowering for abusers.

And hey, before you think to yourself "we should de-anonymize the internet!", lemme tell you: it doesn't matter. I've received rape and death threats from people with their real names, their real faces, and even their work email addresses attached. The issue is less about anonymization and more about there being no consequences for online actions, especially in a community as large and globally widespread as ours.

A Warning to Other Possible Offenders

Having a public list would also fire a warning shot. "People who do these sorts of things are not welcome in our community and we will let people know." The logic goes that making a public example of someone means that others are less likely to do the same things, again, creating a sort of consequence to that behavior. 

If we compare this to another set of rules we expect people to follow - laws - research shows this isn't the case. Harsher penalties don't deter crimes anymore than the law existing. Much of this comes the fact that so many crimes are never punished.

Research to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits.1

A rational analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of a crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal justice realities such as low punishment rates.2

Sound familiar? No group of volunteers could possibly capture information on every offense, especially considering many are never publicly reported for reasons I've already written about

In addition, the abused face a retaliatory effect: being themselves reported as abusers, which isn't unique to the internet. A recent example of this is the Twitter "Report Abuse" button, which allowed people to report specific tweets as abusive. One of the first victims of this was a twitter account that retweeted transphobic tweets to both raise awareness of how casual people are with their transphobic hate, but also to identify dangerous people to block or avoid. Those tweeting transphobic things turned around and reported the account, getting it suspended.

Meanwhile, the reports to Twitter about abuse by their users - including rape threats, death threats, doxxing, and other harassing behavior - are dismissed with alarmingly regularity, assumedly by either an automated system that isn't programmed well or a set of humans that aren't trained well enough on the intricacies of harassment. This, again, leaves all of the power in the hands of the abusers.

Keep Our Community Safe

Another reason to create such a list would be to protect the community. Running a conference or event, hiring, or adding someone new to your project invites a lot of risk. Bringing in the wrong person can damage not only what you're trying to do, but the reputation of the community it sits in. By removing past violators, the hope is that you are keeping them from repeating the same behavior and protecting the community.

The argument against this is that it doesn't allow people to redeem themselves (for the things that are redeemable, which I will not enumerate here). Some actions require only a sincere apology and not repeating the same behavior - a temporary tarnishment to their reputation. Others, due to the nature of the incident, require we weigh the safety of the community over the offender's want for redemption.

On a personal note, I personally block a lot of abusive and harassing people on twitter. The majority of the time that's the last I hear from them, but I have a few people that go out of their way to continue to harass me on twitter or in other mediums. In a couple cases, the people have come around and realized why what they were doing was wrong and sent me apologetic emails. If I feel they're sincere, I've unblocked them.

Provide Evidence of Occurrence

The Geek Feminism Timeline of Incidents exists for exactly this reason - in fact, you can read Why We Document on the Geek Feminism blog for a well-reasoned explanation.

It's important to note that the existence of this list is a huge source of anger for a lot of people. When people ask for evidence of the occurrence of these incidents and the ToL is provided, many react very poorly. I've heard it referred to as a "witch hunt", a "sex offenders registry", and arguments that it violates the "innocent until proven guilty" belief that many Americans hold. What they tend not to want to listen to is the frequency with which nothing is done about these incidents when they are reported to community members, conference organizers, business owners, and even law enforcement. The reality here is that not only are the majority of online harassment reports ignored (or even mocked), but so are in-person reports to people and organizations who have the power to create consequences for the offending individual.

We Have Lists: They're Just Not Public

Many that have faced this kind of behavior have a list. It's not necessarily written down and cataloged, but it exists.

When a friend is thinking about working for a company that allows homophobic slurs in the office, or going to a conference where they've done nothing after a report of abuse, or getting involved in a project where the lead is verbally abusive, we tell them.

We do what we can to protect each other through whispers and emails and private messages because the risk - legal, professional, financial, personal - is too great and the reward so small that doing so publicly isn't worth it.

The unfortunate side-effect of this taking place in private interactions is that only those that are connected and trusted will get this information. This leads a very large group of people vulnerable still because the network isn't large enough yet. We end up excluding the people who need this information the most - the people who have less power and reach, the ones that are most vulnerable to predatory behavior without any recourse of their own.

How Do We Fix This?

We allow this kind of behavior by not calling people out, by not having any real or lasting consequences for those actions, for not taking reports of abuse, harassment, and assault seriously. We don't believe the people who do report and in doing so further victimize them; on top of that, we outright abuse and harass the people who report. If anything, we've taught victims of this behavior to do nothing and say nothing, lest they encourage the wrath of the internet, forever associating their name - and not their abuser's - with something shitty or horrific that happened to them.

We don't take responsibility for our own actions, letting ourselves off the hook by comparing our behavior to someone that is degrees worse. We dismiss what seems to be a small push towards inclusivity (or even the bare minimal of civility) because there are "bigger battles to be fought".

So how does this get fixed? Truthfully, I don't know. The problem is so systemic in our communities. Fixing this is going to require buy-in from a vocal and powerful majority of people. It's going to have to mean people losing opportunities and their standing in our communities because of the things they do.

We cannot reprimand someone for their behavior while still allowing them to enjoy the privileges of their position without sending the message that we are somehow condoning their abusive actions.


1 Wright, Valerie (2010, November), Deterrence in Criminal Justice: Evaluating Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment

2 Robinson, Paul H. and Darley, John M. (2004), Does Criminal Law Deter?