Opinion

Allison Morris: Twitter and Facebook need to respect relationship with users

Social networking service, Twitter is "failing in its responsibility to respect women’s rights online by inadequately investigating and responding to reports of violence and abuse", a new report by Amnesty International has found
Social networking service, Twitter is "failing in its responsibility to respect women’s rights online by inadequately investigating and responding to reports of violence and abuse", a new report by Amnesty International has found Social networking service, Twitter is "failing in its responsibility to respect women’s rights online by inadequately investigating and responding to reports of violence and abuse", a new report by Amnesty International has found

We are living in strange times with social media now permeating every aspect of our work and personal lives.

The investigation by the Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr into Cambridge Analytica showed the power social media platforms wield in modern life.

That Facebook could help influence the outcome of elections, including the Brexit referendum, by helping companies such as Cambridge Analytica share private citizens information is Orwellian.

When George Orwell envisaged his novel 1984, he wrote about omnipresent governmental surveillance and public manipulation.

That book, now almost 70 years old, seems more prophetic than fictional.

Social media has become such a big and all consuming part of many people’s lives.

While the majority only use it to share pictures of their children, cats or last meal many others have made a living out of advertising a lifestyle or targeting clients via social media platforms.

I was a teenager in 1984, when Orwell’s vision for the future was set and pictures then were taken on a usually disposable camera and printed out at the chemist.

I have maybe two or three pictures of myself at that age whereas if I were a teenager now I’d have thousands of pouting images, filtered to unattainable perfection.

As a journalist I’ve seen the positive power of social media in my work.

I use Twitter to share my articles and to engage instantly with readers.

I’ve also seen the negative side.

Twitter is a difficult medium to control in that you have no say over who follows you and blocking a person only takes them out of your eye-line but does not prevent them from posting negative, damaging or untrue posts.

People can set up multiple anonymous accounts and Twitter does nothing to stop this.

While in the main most people are decent and respectful in their engagement, there are those who seem to think the anonymity Twitter provides means they can behave in a way they never would in face to face contact.

I have also been stalked and Twitter is the platform that the person chose to facilitate their criminality.

The social media giants have been appalling in helping me and the police deal with that and slow to remove posts, some of which have including disgusting sexually deviant content targeted at myself and my children.

To see someone target my daughters in such a way has been difficult to deal with and regardless of how strong a person you may think you are, it is testing in the extreme.

With regard to targeted accounts, that is Twitter accounts set up solely for the purpose of abusing an individual or organisation are against Twitter guidelines, the organisation promises to remove them but in my extensive experience they fail miserably to abide by this regardless of how many times the circumstances and background are explained.

Amnesty International have been researching the impact of what they’ve called Toxic Twitter has on women.

As part of that research they’ve interviewed 86 women in the public eye who use social media about their experiences.

They uncovered some horrific examples of how the platform is abused by men targeting women with racist, violent and misogynistic abuse.

They found Twitter was failing to respect women’s rights online. I was one of the women interviewed and spoke about my experience which goes beyond misogyny to facilitating criminality by not removing targeted abuse even when alerted to the circumstances.

Amnesty have managed to put senior Twitter executives on the spot and gained commitments about the future of the platform that I hope will be enforced going forward.

Thanks to the Amnesty and Guardian investigations we’ve now a better understanding of how Twitter and Facebook operate but we should remember that we are the customers, without us they fail to exist and it’s time they started to respect that relationship.