Twitter is using several measures to try to fight those who bully and threaten online, but they not likely to have much effect, says Sam Fiorella, an author and professor of social media marketing at Seneca College in Toronto.
Listen“I think it’ll be a good small blip. I think it’ll be a good PR (public relations) effect for them short term. But the reality is they don’t go far enough to protect those that are being abused and to prevent those who wish to abuse with a platform to do so.”
Trolling hurt the bottom line
Fiorella says Twitter is motivated to take action by two things. First, he notes the trolling had a bad financial effect. “A year ago Google, Disney and Amazon were looking to buy Twitter, but they all backed away because of the amount of racism and anti-Semitism and hate speech… on the site. That hurt them financially.”
The second reason was the surge in abusive tweets that Fiorella puts down to the negativity that has happened as a result of the U.S. election and the political climate, and tweeting by President Donald Trump himself. “The Tweeter-in-Chief, we like to call him. And it’s true. Donald Trump is the most divisive figure in global politics right now. The world is paying attention to him.
Trump ‘has normalized name-calling…lying,’ says professor
Trump, he says,“has normalized name-calling and hate and even flat-out lying about people as part of our national discourse. And he has chosen Twitter as his preferred platform for that. And so, all of his followers are taking that cue. They’re flocking to the network because that’s where he wants to communicate with them.”
Fiorella says that Trump and Whitehouse staffers know how to say negative things but stop short of racism when tweeting while his online followers do not and some of their tweets go over the line.
Trolls invited to drive people to suicide
“A case in point: right after the election a neo-Nazi website called the Daily Stormer published a list of 50 Twitter users who did nothing more than express fear about the outcome of the 2016 election. And they urged all of their readers to punish those 50 people with a barrage of tweets that would drive them to suicide. Those were their exact words and their call to action. So it’s really just gotten out of hand.”
Fiorella says society should be and is concerned about what he calls “the wild west” that is the social media. But he says they are all too new and law enforcement, the social networks, the legal system have not caught up. He hopes that through dialogue and education, people will stop paying attention to those networks, that they will die and a new social norm will be set.
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