On Tuesday , Amnesty International released its findings from a 16 - month investigation into the experience cleaning lady face on Twitter — namely , online abuse . The 77 - page report , # ToxicTwitter : vehemence and abuse against fair sex online , illustrates Twitter ’s failures to protect its most vulnerable users and to be transparent about those failures . The report is being release 12 year afterthe first tweet , which was sent by Twitter co - laminitis and current CEO Jack Dorsey .
“ The master level we keep coming back to time and again is Twitter ’s loser to consistently and adequately implement its own policies prohibiting violence and abuse on the platform , ” Amnesty International investigator Azmina Dhrodia , the theme ’s author , told Gizmodo in an email . “ Despite repeated attack to meliorate their policies and practices and better the experience for all exploiter , which are welcome , as a troupe Twitter has still not taken sufficient steps to effectively and adequately name and address report card of vehemence and abuse and implement its own guidelines . ”
Amnesty International conducted both quantitative and qualitative research from December 2016 through March of this year . The human right system question 86 char and non - binary individuals across the US and UK , conducted a qualitative survey early last year that move over 162 answer , and had a data scientist use simple machine learning to trawl for abusive tweet toward distaff Members of Parliament . According to the analysis , between January 1st and June 8th of last year , 25,688 tweets were opprobrious out of 900,223 detected and psychoanalyze . Amnesty also conducted an online poll in November of last year in eight countries , which included the US and the UK , with a view sampling nationwide representative of women in each of those area .
“ The research highlights the special experience of violence and ill-usage on Twitter against women of colour , cleaning lady from ethnic or religious minorities , lesbian , bisexual or transgender cleaning lady , non - binary individuals , and charwoman with handicap , to demonstrate the intersectional nature of abuse on the platform , ” Amnesty wrote in the account .
While Twitter ’s maltreatment problems are well - document , Dhrodia says that what still stands out is the social mesh ’s lack of foil in how it treat those problems . Last yr , Twitter ’s general director of consumer product and engineering , Ed Ho , drop a line in a blog postthat the company was “ take aim action ” on 10 fourth dimension the number of scurrilous accounts each day than it was at that metre the year before . “ While this sounds good on paper , it ’s meaningless without knowing the service line data point behind it , ” Dhrodia said .
A few recommendations Amnesty had for Twitter include take disaggregated information about harassment account available to the populace , with information on how many of these reports it receive per year , how many of them the companionship discover to be in infraction of its guidelines , and the modal amount of time it submit to respond to these write up . Amnesty published its correspondence with Twitter in the account , which includes the aforementioned suggestions . According to the story , Twitter respond by say that sharing this data “ is not enlightening ” since drug user often abuse the reportage tools .
“ We absolutely agree that linguistic context is important when partake any raw data , but their argument does not keep back because there is nothing stopping them from providing that context alongside whatever datum they share , ” Dhrodia say .
Amnesty remark in the report that as of March 16th of this class , the establishment has met in - mortal with Twitter ’s legal and public policy expert three clip — in Washington , DC , in May of last year , in San Francisco in February , and in London in March . Amnesty says it has also pass along with Twitter over the telephone set , via email , and by post . Twitter responded to the organization ’s concerns “ but refused to leave the data requested about the reporting appendage and subject matter moderation , ” grant to the report . Amnesty says Twitter continued to deny these requests during its in - person encounter this year .
“ The averment that Twitter is consciously unengaged with human rights publication is an unjust representation not just of the facts , but of the ethos of our consecrate teams , and the gist mission of the company , ” Vijaya Gadde , Twitter ’s Legal , Policy , & Trust & Safety Lead , tell in a assertion . She added that the company concur with many of the report ’s recommendation and that it is already act on some of them , note that the company has already made over 30 changes over the last 16 months and increase its action rate by ten .
“ We have made substantial modification to our reporting puppet and continue to improve them as well working to pass on more clearly with our drug user on reports and how we enlist insurance , ” she said . “ We continue to expand our Transparency Report to include relevant and meaningful information . We have seen extraordinary troth stand women . The rise of movements like # MeToo , # WomensMarch , and # PositionOfStrength are testimony to the great power of Twitter as a chopine for women and their allies to apportion account , offer documentation , and advocate for change . ”
In March , Twitter wrote in a letter to Amnesty that it “ can not delete hatred and prejudice from society . ” Dhrodia view this as a way for Twitter to play down its responsibilities by instead doubling down on society ’s full emergence . “ We are not asking them to solve the world ’s job , ” she said . “ We are asking them to take concrete steps to transparently show that they are deal with the trouble of online violence and abuse against women on their own weapons platform . ”
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