[ad_1]
Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter until 2015, summed up the problem as follows: "We are very proud to handle fake abuse and accounts, and we have been disgusted for years. The numbers, in fact, do not deceive: in Italy, one in three tweets is catalogable as a hate speech, that is to say an incitement to hate. Despite the belief that the social network of 280 characters would be more elitist and moderate than Facebook (which also has 2.2 billion subscribers, against the 330 million Twitter).
The last to decide to leave the ship chirps, tired of having to end up between insults and personal attacks, it's the Pulitzer Prize reporter, Maggie Haberman. White House correspondent for the New York Times, winner of the 2018 award for his articles on Russiagate, he explains his reasons in an editorial published in the New York newspaper. "Nastiness, factious and toxic rage, intellectual dishonesty and badism have reached a point of no return.Today, Twitter is the place where those who are angry at their legitimate motives come to express their anger," he said. explained Haberman. This Sunday night, after 9 years and 187 thousand tweets, he said goodbye to his account. "I'm taking a break from this platform, which does not help the debate at all," he wrote one last time on his profile. The journalist was a convinced fan of the social network, said she met friends and received advice. But now the time spent justifying every opinion, every sentence of his plays was too much. "Twitter has become the video game of rage – he said in the editorial – it's the only platform on which people feel free to say things that no one would ever say". Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey could only agree with her. He defined Haberman's "right critics," adding that the social network will attempt to focus more on "conversational dynamics," to become a place where confrontation is possible.
To clean up the platform of fake accounts and trolls, of these generally anonymous profiles whose sole purpose is to provoke and foment the fighting, Twitter tries. Between May, June and early July, as unveiled by the Washington Post, the social network founded in 2006 suspended 70 million accounts, or more than one million per day. Most of them are robots, i.e. Automatic users programmed to spread hoaxes or incite hatred, but to be "banned", they are also false, inactive or blocked profiles. The unexpected purge led many to wonder why the number of their supporters had decreased. For example, US President Donald Trump lost 300,000 subscribers. The most affected, singer Katy Perry, lost more than 2.8 million in one day. But, if on the one hand the figures reported by the Washington Post are rebaduring, on the other hand, they raised doubts about the number of "junks" that chirp. The company estimated that less than 5% of active users were false profiles and less than 8.5% of robots, but the numbers could be higher.
On the other hand, looking at our home, more than three in three Italians use Twitter to vent their discomfort. Migrants, Jews and Muslims in particular are targeted, as shown by the ban card of 2018 made by the Vox-Italian Observatory of Rights in collaboration with the Statale and the Catholic University of Milan, University of Bari and La Sapienza of Rome. The trend is upwards: while in 2017 "hate tweets" accounted for 32.45% of the total, in 2018 they rose to 36.93%
. But fomenting online divisions is often used for political purposes, as evidenced by the 2016 US presidential elections: this is after the news of Russia's alleged interference that Twitter decided to proceed with cleanings general. A real troll factory was discovered by the Guardian in Jakarta, Indonesia: the country will soon go to the elections and one of the candidates hired a group of students at $ 280 a month – remunerative salary for local norms – to revive the content favorable to him and give to his opponents. In a day, there are about 2,400 tweets generated. And it is not excluded that other candidates also have their own personal "spammers". As if to say: Twitter's efforts are noble, but it's like emptying the sea with a teaspoon.
Source link
