Have any women made a coordinated effort to boycott Twitter? Would it make a difference? I'm pretty new to Twitter, and I don't know if it would make a dent, but I'd certainly be willing to try.

I'd hold off on the boycotts, I know people in twitter, and they're working on it. Arguably they should have had solutions in place long ago, but they're headed in the right direction now.

That being said, it doesn't hurt to keep the pressure on.

I'm amazed by how slow Twitter has been to adopt account and content controls. Twitter still feels like something cooked up in a dorm room and simply scaled up to bizarre proportions. On the back end they are driving the creation of new database methodologies. While on the front end they still don't have support for multi-user accounts, flagging inappropriate content, multi-factor authentication, and any manner of other technologies you'd expect in a platform that is supposed to be driving world affairs. And still with the character limit? What the hell.

Here's how reporting harassment in an online social medium should work:
Click a little "report" button next to the offending post. Select the radio button corresponding to the relevant offense category in the box that pops up. Hit "submit".
Twitter, is it that hard to set up?

@5 It's not that they don't have a report button, it's that it's ineffective, and the few times company representatives do provide a sign that they've received anything it's been problematic.

i.e. https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/36158…

e.g. https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/36159…

@6 Exactly, what happens on the back end is what's important, but a $10 billion dollar company should be able to hire someone to figure this out.

You should type this sexier.

@5: You're forgetting a step:

Hire teams of people to sift through hundreds of thousands of complaints your little "report" button will produce each week in order to separate threats of death/rape from things like "he said something mean" or "this tweet is inconsistent with christian values".

What is considered a rape threat online, exactly? Does "I hope you get raped" or "I'd love to rape that bitch" count? Or only things like "I know where you live and I am going to come and rape you"? I mean, I've been the recipient of the former kind of "threat" by a nice liberal feminist ("I hope you get raped in prison.")

When I used to practice criminal law in Washington, a threat was not a crime unless it reasonably put the target in fear. Personally, I think it makes more sense to address someone you disagree with rational arguments rather than "I hope you die" attacks, but I am leery of efforts to criminalize or shut down speech beyond what already exist...maybe not even that far.

As @6 was referring to, Anita Sarkeesian has been documenting her own struggle with the same issue. She's repeatedly reported graphic threats of rape and violence, and Twitter just replies that no one has violated their terms of service. Since this kind of harassment is so widespread, it gives the impression - well, to me, at least - that Twitter is just reluctant and maybe afraid to take steps against such a large problem if they can get away with ignoring it.

Twitter won't do anything about this unless it becomes enough of a PR disaster that they HAVE to do something about it, just like with every web site everywhere. By putting this post up on Slog, Cienna is helping to make sure that it becomes visible enough that Twitter has to deal with it.

Being upset with twitter, no matter how awful or outrageous the tweets, is a silly endeavor that only underscores the depravity of dive-to-the-bottom cyber mentality.
When telephones were first invented, many people were aghast at them thinking that why in the world would I want to speak to someone if they weren't with them. I wish people had the same disposition about Twitter, e.g., why in the would should I care about what other people say.

@11: Twitter sees itself as communication infrastructure in the same category as phones and email. Just like telephone companies and email providers, they'd rather leave policing to law enforcement than have to monitor billions of communications and try to determine whether any of them violate "policy".

Which makes sense. Why do we need Twitter to chase down illegal speech when we have police and prosecutors? If someone threatens to rape you over the phone, you don't call ATT customer service, you dial 911.

Block the account and move on. Twitter isn't responsible for the actions of their users and would need, literally, millions of employees to effectively investigate abuse.