By Aaron Miller-
Twitter allowed a violation to occur on its platform without recognizing it. The social media’s grand error shows how important it is for the organization to be sharp when dealing with complaints from its users. More so when the complaints are coming from politicians and highly established personnel.
Twitter like all organisations who claim to be responsible have a duty to treat seriously the complaints of all those who complain of any activity originating from action under its jurisdiction. Revelation that threats were sent on twitter to other victims by crazy Cesar Sayoc worsens the criticism against twitter Threats sent to others include Joe Biden, former New York attorney general candidate Zephyr Teachout, and New York Times journalist and former Verge writer Sarah Jeong.
In each of these cases, no action was taken. Cesar Sayoc Jr, 56, came to the attention of the social media company two weeks before the alleged attacks when he sent a threatening tweet to Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie. Ms Ritchie’s complaint was carelessly rejected by support staff at the social media giant, who decided the message did not violate the rules against abusive behaviour.
Support staff replied the same day to tell her: ”We have reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter rules against abusive behaviour.” Twitter eventually suspended the account within a few hours. The response time wasn’t that bad, but a giant social media platform of this stature should respond much quicker. They were too slow to detect the mail as a violation of their policy.
”Please disregard our last reply as it was sent in error,” the company told Ms Ritchie. ”We apologise for any inconvenience. We’ve investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behaviour.”Ms Ritchie replied: “Oh so it was an error. Just stop!”“ The Tweet clearly violated our rules and should have been removed. We are deeply sorry for that error.
”We are investigating what happened and will continue to work to improve how we handle concerns raised by anyone on Twitter. We want Twitter to be a place where people feel safe, and we know we have lot of work to do,” the social media platform said.
The tweet in question was finally removed, along with the rest of Sayoc’s suspected Twitter activity, after he was charged with multiple felonies related to mailbombs send to high-profile Trump critics. However, failings of this type have been reported by other users in the past who claim to have received no response. It is disappointing, and requires action to avoid a repeat. Twitter followers were quick to criticize Twitter over the blunder. One user complained that every complaint they have made in the past couple of months remain active.
Chairman Skelefrog
@DanMoffTarkin
Replying to @MediaWest @TwitterSafety
Every account I’ve reported in the past couple years for death threats/harassment/blatant hate speech is still active. Most of the time they don’t even notify me about reports.Replying to @dianelyssa @TwitterSafety
Exactly. Especially when he had so many of them. These are only a handful of additional death threats that the Magabomber made towards people that I got screenshots of before his accounts were shut down”.
Twitter will have to review its operations and response times to complaints made by its users.