How to End Online Harassment and Make Social Media Walled Gardens Again

June 6, 2016

Online harassment goes too wide and over and many personalities suffered it. So, how can we end online harassment?

The reality is "Harassment is ruining the Interner"

Social networks need to become "walled gardens" again.

The conventional wisdom is that, when it comes to social platforms, open is good and closed is bad.

Facebook used to be slammed as a walled garden. But after Google+ came out in 2011 as a social site with public posts that you could link to and find from ordinary search, Facebook followed suit, and Facebook-as-a-walled-garden was no more. Now Facebook is mostly open (albeit with a flawed real-names policy and proprietary formats like Facebook Instant Articles).

The reason we need to bring back the wall around our social gardens is as simple as it is obvious: harassment is ruining the Internet.

How Periscope torpedoes abuse

Twitter has a harassment problem. And so does Periscope, the live-streaming site owned by Twitter.

Most abuse on Periscope comes in the form of comments. A typical scenario is when a woman or girl is live-streaming say, expressing a political opinion about the upcoming U.S. presidential election and abusive commenters make requests of them as if they were on an adult chat site. Other categories of abuse are the usual suspects: racism, shaming, mockery, threats and so on.

Periscope last week enabled an innovative anti-harassment process called "flash juries."

During a live stream, anyone can report a comment as abusive. A report of abuse triggers a process whereby a few random viewers of the stream are selected to be part of a "jury" that votes on the report. If a majority say it's abusive, the person who posted that comment gets banned from commenting for a minute. If the same user makes another comment deemed abusive by another flash jury, that user is blocked from further commenting during that stream.

Nice, but not perfect. Periscope streaming audiences can be very small, so a group of trolls can easily overwhelm the comments and dominate the voting, casting "no" votes when asked if their own comments are abusive and possibly even reporting and voting on non-abusive comments by regular viewers.

What's most interesting about flash juries is that it's the first time Twitter has allowed users to take direct action against abuse.

src: computerworld.com

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