Pebbles Hooper, Amy Mek, Cursed Salad and others such as Kaeley Triller and even alcohol healthwatch are allowed to post abusive or hateful content, and in the case of alcohol healthwatch, hateful conduct and platform manipulation. How Twitter allows such content and accounts to remain on the platform should raise some serious questions. On Twitter, the rules are getting a lot stricter and there is a crackdown on abusive content (and rightfully so). Small accounts, such as stan accounts i.e. K-pop fan accounts, celebrity fan accounts, and normal accounts such as resistors get banned for less - such as using swear words at someone else or cursing former president Donald Trump. Sure, some of the content that normal users post would violate the rules and Twitter was right to take action in those cases, but what we're seeing here is that big and/or verified accounts are not only allowed to do it over and over again, but also are given a free pass to be egregious, such as Amy Mek, whose account is nothing but reeks of total Islamophobia and anti refugee racism/discrimination without a fear of suspension. We will be looking at two cases here as an example of this. One case here is Pebbles Hooper: She has accrued multiple strikes on her account (see the page on her for info). Had anyone else who is not a public figure or a child of someone famous made the same number of violations as Pebbles, they perhaps would have been suspended, perhaps immediately. My feeling is because she is the daughter of two fashion designers and business people, and due to the number of followers she has, and also being a social commentator, she is being given a free pass to harass and abuse others on Twitter, over and over again. We are going to look at Amy Mek next, an Islamophobic woman with a bot like profile appearance. Despite the appearance, Amy Mek is indeed, a real person, and almost everything she posts on her timeline is against the Twitter rules: From hateful content to Covid 19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. There is just too many tweets to document them all, therefore I won't be creating a page for her. But one thing is for certain - despite the fact the account warrants a permanent suspension, Twitter allows Amy Mek to spew out her vile abuse and misinformation. This is another example of Twitter's failure of moderation. These people, for example, have proven that they cannot use Twitter without being abusive or hateful. Yet Twitter gives them a platform because of their high profile nature. Yet if normal users were to tweet like the examples above, they would get suspended. What can be done about this?
Twitter needs to apply the rules to everyone, equally. Politicians, fashion designers, celebrities, businesses, organizations and charities etc. (list goes on) needs to and must abide by the rules and not act in an abusive, hateful and a manipulative manner that disrupts anyone else's experience. Furthermore, they must not spread misinformation or disinformation. Any verified account found to violate the rules once should be stripped of their blue check mark until they delete their tweet and appeal. Making violations more than once should be an automatic and a permanent loss of the verified status without appeal. Any verified account dedicated to abuse, hatred or misinformation should be suspended. Any account reported for abuse or hateful conduct should have their whole account scanned by Twitter and accounts found to be set up solely to dedicating themselves to being hateful or abusive (Examples: Pebbles Hooper, Amy Mek, Kaeley Triller, JK Rowling) should be suspended permanently. Until Twitter takes moderating high profile accounts, verified accounts, and large accounts seriously (including imposing bans), we will see it for an abusive account such as Pebbles, Kaeley and Amy, "one rule for me and another for thee".
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2021 has been a challenging year for all of us, more specifically due to Covid and the resulting lockdowns. 2021 however on the bright side, saw many, many suspensions of Groypers, white nationalists, Nazis and verified accounts. Most notably, we saw the suspension of Donald Trump's Twitter account due to the Capitol Riots on January the 6th.
My goals this year is to get more trolls off Twitter, hold Twitter accountable when they suspend innocent people - and leave the bad actors up, and bring trolls such as British Dean, Pebbles Hooper and Michael Pressman to face the consequences of the law for their conduct online. I also will call for Twitter to make ban evasion using SIM cards, burner emails and phone numbers and other methods a violation, as well as encouraging others to evade bans. I will also call for trolls who've we have reported for a very long time but are still up - such as Cursed Salad, Amy Mek and Pebbles Hooper - to be suspended from Twitter for repeatedly violating the rules and also for being abusive and hateful. I will, most importantly, be reporting more hate speech and harassment than ever, when I see it. Twitter isn't the only platform I will be keeping an eye on. I will report trolls on platforms such as Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram and others. I will also monitor gaming platforms such as Roblox. I will also hold them accountable as well for failing to moderate the actions of bad actors. Let's hope that this year will be a better one for all of us, and that social media, messaging and gaming sites starts to get really serious on clamping down on trolls, Nazis and bigots. Twitter is a good platform when everyone uses it wisely and sensibly. But, unfortunately, not everyone uses it as intended to by Twitter - and that includes adhering to the platform's Terms of Service. And when this happens, this can disrupt people's experience on Twitter in a negative way, and can, in the worst cases, force normal people off Twitter as they are being repeatedly abused by trolls. There is a small to medium network of trolls who repeatedly break Twitter's Terms of Service and the Twitter Rules, and who go on to create new accounts after being banned repeatedly. Some of these trolls also include offensive handles in their usernames and profile names. Many of them boast about using VPNS, SIM cards, burner numbers or emails etc. And yet Twitter does absolutely nothing about this either. Take trolls like Know Your Enemy, for instance, who keeps rematerializing after she gets banned. And what's more, she (very) brazenly admits to the violations she's made, and the number of accounts she's created, and the fact that she's openly anti semitic. This goes to show that Twitter isn't being serious in their moderation, and isn't taking repeat ban evaders and notable trolls seriously. Twitter needs to implement some form of a security measure to stop people like KYE and British Dean from creating new accounts - such as an IP ban for repeat offenders, and requiring people to verify their identity when signing up for a new account. Twitter also needs to develop an algorithm that recognizes banned trolls that they have suspended before, so that they can ban them again. One way to do this is to perhaps develop an algorithm to detect profile pictures of banned users, such as a known troll known as "DieJewDie". Twitter also needs to block the creation of ANY account that contains offensive slurs - such as the N word - regardless of if it is a Racist Respawner or a shitposter or a normal user. Twitter also needs to add a ban evasion as an option for why an account is being reported.
We will start taking Twitter seriously when Twitter implements security measures to stop repeat ban evaders, impostors (of any kind) and trolls. We will start taking Twitter seriously when Twitter starts listening to us. Twitter will be a better place without these bigoted and abusive respawners and trolls.
Twitter has made many promises to do better. One of them is to automatically remove abusive tweets with hateful content in them. Another way is through autoblocking, which features from a mode called safety mode which blocks abusive or spammy accounts from interacting with you for 7 days. And another one is a prompt asking users to rethink their tweet before they post. But Twitter doesn't seem to care about abusive, threatening and hateful profile user handles - such as user handles containing rape references, glorifying pedophilia or user handles with slurs in them.
This is a problem we have to deal with regularly when we report accounts. Take trolls like "Lemon" for instance, or members of The Shed, and they create chat rooms with names like "rape room".
This not only against the Twitter rules on abusive profile information, but these trolls are a safety risk to women and children as their user name encourages violence against women and children. Names like the following in the screenshot in the embedded tweet encourages rape, pedophilia and violence and it is not OK, and especially so that women more frequently becoming victims of domestic violence and murder.
A similar rule applies with hateful slurs, except it covers a more broader range than just women. Jewish people, Muslims, other religious groups, people of colour and members of the LGBTQA+ community are often frequent targets by trolls with user handles that attack one of the groups above. This make these groups feel unsafe on Twitter, and it also creates a hinderance for moderators who have to go through every twitter username that is reported to them.
Twitter not only needs to remove abusive usernames - they need to block the creation of new usernames and featuring abusive user handles. There are so many ways that abusive usernames are detected such as "Kate Hikes" (who is a troll) - switch the first letter of both the first and last name around - and an anti semitic userhandle will be the result.
If Twitter truly cared about their users, they would take action on accounts with abusive profile information. If Twitter cared, they would blacklist words and symbols (such as the Nazi swastika) that are not appropriate as a username or a profile display name and tell new users that those words cannot be used in either. It makes sense, given that I could not use "Twitter" in my profile display name, on my @failedguideline account right? Yes. Until Twitter takes action on usernames with abusive handles, spammy code digits and starts to ban accounts with abusive profile information, and blacklist inappropriate words, imagery and symbols (especially those listed in the ADL database and MGTOW symbols), I will not take Twitter seriously when it comes to the rules on profile information.
It appears that trolls are getting much more creative in their N-word (and other slur word) towers, and Twitter has yet to implement a rule that detects this kind of behavior or moderate these kinds of tweets. The latest cases we see of creation, unfortunately, is that trolls are now implementing - and abusing literature and poetry to disguise their towers so that they can now abuse others more freely while evading detection. Here are just two of many, many ways and tactics that the trolls are getting around moderation and evading suspensions. Acrostic Poems Our first example of trolls getting more creative in their ways to create their slur word towers, in an attempt to avoid being detected or picked up by Twitter, is the use of the acrostic poem, which is a popular form of poetry used by poetry writers and social media users alike. This poetry involves using words in which the starting letter of each word forms a word vertically down. An example is below - I created an example of this and used random words and place names to create the word "ABSTRACT" when read vertically. The starting letter is highlighted in bold, to highlight the letter that is supposed to be read vertically down. Sometimes, each word used in this poem may be done to a theme, but in the case example below, I picked random places and words. Below is an example of trolls nearly forming the N word tower, using innocent words in an acrostic poem using the reply feature - to attempt to avoid being detected by Twitter. Note that trolls have used the theme of chemistry and science to try to evade being detected by both Twitter and the public. Each element in each reply starts with a capital letter. Another troll has incited other trolls to start of the N word tower, and give those trolls themes - and ideas on how to do it. Luckily, one of the accounts appear to have deactivated, resulting in the slur word poetry tower not being complete. Let's hope it stays that way. The single words in each reply may seem innocent to unwitting Twitter users, and perhaps to science enthusiasts, may be interested in the science chain like that above but if you follow the reply thread, then read the first letter of each word vertically downwards, then you will know that it is anything but innocent. Trolls are deliberately doing this to evade detection, moderation actions and even account suspensions. It is also, like the original N word letter tower, a form of platform manipulation and spam, as these word and poetry chains can be deceptive. Using single letters in a phrase to form a vertical word In other cases, trolls use single letters to turn what should be an otherwise innocent phrase - into a phrase that is used to create a hateful slur on Twitter via the reply function. In some cases, trolls may start off the chain with either a tweet that is not a reply, or a quote tweet. Below in this image, I have created an example of how trolls can use phrases and/or sentences to form a word/slur word chain. I have used a random name - "ANNE" as an example. Here are the trolls below participating in an N word tower, in the form of a phrase. In some cases, like below, these can also, like the acrostic poem, be poetic, and can also be rhythmic. Clearly, the OP of this one is stupid, because the N word tower is NOT one of power. Again, this can go against the rules of platform manipulation and spam as these sentences and phrases are tweeted with intent to incite hatred against black people (in this case, at least), while disguising it as innocent phrases. This is what would be described as deceptive and hateful behavior. In the case above, it appears that Hunter Walker, a verified journalist, had unwittingly started of the N word poetry tower chain through no fault of his own - the trolls decided to take advantage of him calling out racism - and using his tweet to create a tower. In this case, this not only is a case of platform manipulation/spam and hateful conduct, but it is targeted harassment since they are not only dogpiling onto him, and they are also abusing him as well as they have created the N word tower chain - and aimed it at him while exploiting his tweet against him. Unfortunately, it appears there is still no policy on this kind of behavior as of yet - and the rules on harassment, hateful conduct and platform manipulation and spam need to be updated. Twitter has updated their hateful conduct to include incitement against protected categories, but has not included encouraging others to participate in abusive behavior towards a category, and neither have they included using the reply function to abuse others based on their race or nationality. Twitter needs to do better and must update all three of their policies to include slur towers and phrases, and other forms of slur towers disguised by any other means, including GIFS, memes, videos and imagery. Twitter also must implement a system that detects any type of slur word chains, and add an option for reporting under hateful conduct as "this user is using the reply function to create hateful slur or phrase towers" so that trolls will have a harder time creating these towers.
2020 was indeed a very tough year, with lots of challenges, in particular challenges surrounding Black Civil Rights and the coronavirus pandemic. There was a lot going on in social media - especially during global lockdowns, when people had gone online and tuned into the software known as Zoom, a video chatting app. There were many major events around the world that were covered by news outlets on social media, including the Belarus protests, BLM protests, the US election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
From Covid-19 misinformation, through to racism, violence and extremism, we have seen it all. We have encountered vile Facebook pages mocking Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and had reported them. We have also encountered coronavirus profiles on both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, interestingly enough, says that most of them are not a fake account. This year, I have had several impostor accounts impersonating @clampdownonhate and @failedguideline - two impostor accounts that impersonated the former have been suspended, while the third impostor account of that former one is still up - along with an impostor of @failedguideline. We have, reported and suspended at least a a few hundred accounts this year. And we have successfully brought down two accounts belonging to Omid Mankoo, and many Know Your Enemy profiles, as we did this year with Gigi and her Nazi troll gang this year. We also successfully got several Nicky Wright accounts suspended, and the investigation into his online conduct is still going. We were pretty successful in reporting Tik Tok and Instagram profiles as well, many Tik Tok profiles were removed - notably ones that were white supremacist ones, or Nazi ones - including Groyper accounts. We also brought down an account belonging to a men's rights collective known as MGTOW. Many of the Instagram accounts were Nazi ones, the others that were reported that were not bigoted, or were not spreading misinformation in any way, were spammy - such as those Instagram accounts who were promoting free followers or advertising purchases of followers. We have also, although to a lesser extent, successfully got some Facebook accounts removed for not being an authentic. Some white nationalist accounts had replied to me - and got suspended in the end. Then there was at least two accounts titled "DieJewDie" we reported and suspended very quickly, after we noticed that the second one, at least had replied to me. This was a major success for us, and a dampener for them- and their hateful rhetorics. This year also saw the suspensions of some major far-right accounts - such as Katie Hopkins, David Duke, Ashley Goldenberg (Groypenberg), Stefan Molyneux and others. In July this year, we saw over 50 accounts of major white supremacists and nationalists being banned from Twitter, including the French branch of Generation Identity. Action Zealandia has also had their first account suspended, but is now active on another account @hailzealandia, evading a permanent suspension of the previous account. Overall, while Twitter has not been exactly pitch-perfect in removing accounts, and additionally, I am no longer getting updates of reports from several accounts that I use, we know that our reports are working - and that posting accounts out for report works as they get suspended. And Twitter has at least made some effort into banning hateful accounts and those acting in bad faith. Additionally, I have also set up a Telegram bot that aggregates any mention of Groyper, or Groyper accounts, at 20 tweets per hour, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. At least one Groyper account got suspended successfully as a result of the aggregation system. This bot will aggregate daily, even throughout any holiday or occasion. Next year - early in the New Year, we will be back and better than ever, ready to report and deplatform more accounts, including Groypers and Wignats. We will be ready should Omid makes another appearance on Twitter, and tracking his every move. We will also conduct an investigation into Jesse Kempson's social media accounts and inform the authorities of any account that is confirmed to be his, so they can move quickly and swiftly to get those accounts removed. And more importantly, we will commit to making social media as safe as possible for everyone. Twitter is cracking down on hateful slurs, and words and slurs that are aimed at other Twitter users. But now, however, bigots are finding new ways to get around the blacklisted slurs. Hateful slurs are not allowed on Twitter, as part of Twitter's rules on hateful conduct, abuse and harassment, abusive profile information and hateful imagery policy, with limited exceptions made - in those cases, people can use slurs to reclaim those words (as a part of their culture as what the slur is associated with), or to condemn the word, and those who use them willfully. However, now that trolls, bigots and Nazis are seeing this, as more of their accounts are getting banned or they are being made to delete their tweets, they are finding new ways to get around Twitter's policy. And Twitter is doing not a lot about this. Take the N word tower, for instance, where Nazis post a single letter, starting with the letter N to start the N word tower chain. After the letter "N", trolls then reply with a single letter until the full word is formed. In some cases, media - such as memes, videos and imagery - is used instead of a single letter tweet. This is one of the tactics the trolls employ to get around twitter enforcement actions, such as being made to delete the tweet, being placed in a timeout, or a permanent suspension. This is because it is very hard to report a single letter as hate speech - Twitter will just take it as a letter and will ignore it, in most cases. The most you could do is report the tweet as spam, or being tweeted out by a fake account. It is more likely to be actionable on spam, especially if the sender has been suspended previously, or is a fake account. While single letters may seem harmless in a single tweet, it is the user's intention of posting that letter is what is causing concern. Additionally, the single letter is being used to form a hateful slur using the reply function. Sometimes, the first letter of a slur is posted as a tweet, rather than being used in a reply. In the case above, the troll who started the word tower has an intention to attack black people and be abusive. Other ways of getting around blacklisted slurs is using an asterisk (*), in place of a letter, to censor a word. Similarly, numbers, symbols and even letters can be used in replacement to censor a word, or to disguise a word. In other cases, emojis can be used to replaced some letters of a word, or even a whole word. And those emojis can also be used to form an abusive phrase, or even a sentence. And yet, in other cases, media such as memes, gifs, imagery and videos are used to hide slurs and hateful phrases or sentences. Sometimes, words have their letters replaced to mock the subject or the definition of that word or degrade the definition of a particular word. These are often aimed at women, the LGBTQA+ community, religious groups, ethnic and indigenous groups, as well as other marginalized groups. In other circumstances, words may have extra letters to exaggerate the definition of a word. It is also not uncommon for trolls to replace a name of a gender, religious group, gender identity, sexual orientation or an ethnic group with a word they use to refer to the group they are targeting in question - sometimes these words can also be abusive, as the replacement words sometimes are those that describe the group that they target as "inferior", or the replacement word is that of one that is associated with a particular group - and that word references morals, inferiority, and intellectuality. Often, they directly reference racist or sexist tropes - words such as "banks", "goblins", bananas", "cheap", "gold diggers" etc. In the case of Anti Semitism, trolls use the echo symbol, in place of the word "Jew". Twitter doesn't seem to take action against this kind of behavior, and specifically so under hateful conduct or abuse and harassment. While disguising slurs as innocent words and using the reply function to form hateful slur chains goes against the rules of platform manipulation and spam (and rightfully so, as these chains can disrupt people's experience in conversations on Twitter), Twitter does not see this kind of behavior as falling under hateful conduct and abuse and harassment - even when it clearly does so. Twitter clearly needs to develop an algorithm in which they can detect hateful slurs through the use of word or letter chains, such as the N word tower chain, and take action against those who use the reply function to create a hateful slur. The rules on platform manipulation and spam, as well as hateful conduct and abusive behavior policy needs to be updated - to include a rule stating that users may not use the reply (or quote tweet) function to post solitaire letters or any kind of media containing solitaire letters to form hateful or abusive words, slurs or phrases. Additionally, they need to develop an algorithm to detect words that are being used to replace hateful slurs, or hateful and offensive slurs that are disguised as a normal word. Sometimes, an asterisk is used to censor words such as women, Muslims and blacks, in order to attack people belonging to those and other groups. An asterisk also allows trolls and bigots to get around the Twitter rules using slurs, which is problematic - and Twitter needs to implement an algorithm to detect this behavior as well.
And finally, Twitter needs to develop an algorithm designed to detect disguised slurs - in the form of words, emojis or media. This all includes optical illusions designed to hide slurs in the form of media, using a mixture of numbers, letters and symbols to form a hateful slur and replacing single letters in a word. This is certainly not exhaustive. Twitter also needs to implement a better reporting system - and update it, too. They should include a broader range of issues, including using manipulative tactics to get around the Twitter rules, which should fall under platform manipulation and spam, in addition to including more issues as to how the person is being abusive or hateful. And finally, Twitter needs to act swiftly on these reports and take them seriously. As my Twitter account [clampdownonhate] starts to gain a bigger following, and is getting noticed more, I have decided to create a forum, a tumblr blog, and now a website for the Twitter account. The purpose of this website is to highlight news around the world relating to hate speech, hate crimes and anything to do with feminism and anti fascism as well as news on politics. The purpose of this site is also to challenge bigotry in all forms, from homophobia to anti semitism, to misogyny to Islamophobia.
This site will be associated with my Twitter account clampdownonhate, as well as the sister account failedguideline. This site will expose some of the worst bigots and trolls on the internet, as well as share news from verified sites. This website will be linked with two Twitter accounts, both are mentioned and highlighted above. Any news regarding either of the mentioned accounts will be posted here as well. I intend to gain a bigger following, and spread awareness of the impacts on hate speech as well as the fact that social media removes the wrong content, while allowing bad actors and hateful and abusive content to remain up - look at Facebook, for instance, who removes posts with the phrase "men are trash", and Instagram, who deletes sex workers' accounts, while both allow Nazis to remain on their platform, as well as posts and accounts who deliberately manipulate their audiences by spreading misinformation. Facebook and Twitter also need to be called out for their failure in removing content that repeatedly targets Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex and causing friction within the Royal Family. Enough said. Hate speech is not okay. And that's why this website will be here to stay - educate and spread awareness. |
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