What a clown.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took a civility victory lap on Twitter yesterday, claiming 280 characters has been good for the social media platform because now people have extra characters and can say “please” and “thank you” more often. 54% for please, and 22% for thank you to be exact:
Last year, we upgraded tweet length to 280 and guess what? Use of 'please' is up 54% and 'thank you' is up 22%. I love that! Also, people are asking more questions and having more conversations. All this, and the majority of tweets are still under 140. It worked.
— Biz Stone (@biz) October 30, 2018
And the reaction isn’t quite what he was expecting:
And it’s still a cesspool of racism, misogyny, anti-semitism, hate speech, false news, violent threats and harassment— that @jack refuses to clean up.
— Walt Mossberg (@waltmossberg) October 30, 2018
Is Biz Stone this clueless?
I have noticed the anti-Semitic replies and occasional threat of violence now contain more characters, so nice work. https://t.co/2dgwG2nazM
— Beto O'Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) October 30, 2018
It’s funny because he does believe it:
Sigh. Do you really, honestly believe it is more civil with 280?
— Jennifer Gunter (@DrJenGunter) October 31, 2018
Our complaint has long been that there’s absolutely no transparency on who gets suspended or why or what type of speech will get you banned, so maybe a community manager would be a good idea:
Hi. Today I had to delete all of my tweets because an elected official retweeted me and then a wave of eggs tweeted and rt’d vulgarities at me all day. This platform isn’t safe and you need a community manager to advocate for the users, or you are complicit
— Annemarie Dooling (@TravelingAnna) October 30, 2018
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Others are pointing out that if Twitter can track “please” and “thank you” use, what about other words?
Cool, what are the stats on racial slurs? https://t.co/SAwJwgH54o
— Aamer Rahman (@aamer_rahman) October 31, 2018
Yes we can keep track of politeness on our platform.
No we cannot keep track of violence on our platform… https://t.co/XjTnmiD9Te— Nolen Gertz (@ethicistforhire) October 31, 2018
So you collect detailed stats on our etiquette, but still struggle with harassment and nazis ? https://t.co/GcgSrrw4ks
— Gwen Pearson (@bug_gwen) October 31, 2018
And maybe Twitter can filter out these pleases and thank yous:
Very keen to see how many tweets are actually -"please Twitter, sort this out" or "I reported this person. Thank you for replying back that their tweet doesn't violate Twitter policies" or variants of these… ? https://t.co/n1grCqgyFq
— Subrahmanyam KVJ (@SuB8u) October 31, 2018
See?
“Please” get rid of the Nazis. “Thank you.” https://t.co/vGvfgdTK1q
— Marc Torrence (@marctorrence) October 31, 2018
***
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