Call to action: Twitter needs to use its power to stop graphically abusive accounts

 

  Warning: Some of the images in this post are not safe for work. 

Twitter is an open forum for anyone who wants to tweet their mind. That's great. I partake in a big way. But when I get tweets-- daily, hourly, sometimes piling on one after the other-- that are abusive, insulting, viciously demeaning, hostile, and sometimes violent, then it's time to take action.

Twitter sure doesn't. I know that for a fact, because I've tried over and over again to convince them that in some cases, it stops being free speech and starts feeling like assault.

 [NOTE: This post is not about cyber bullies, although they, too, are abusive; I've been harassed and smeared for years by one "progressive" who many of you became aware of and have since avoided. This is about extremist trolls, who also happen to bully.]

I regularly hear from right wing extremists, tea partiers, and total nutcases (that's not hyperbole, there are some very sick people out there). When they're civil, I simply ignore or block them, and even debate them once in awhile. And yes, I admit to succumbing to occasional lapses of playing Whack a Troll just to share their ignorance with my followers, using as much snarky mockitude as I can muster up.

But then there are those who pop in repeatedly to suggest various activities that they want me to engage in-- with my own body or theirs-- and apply colorful words like c**t and suck my c**k, simply because they've read my tweets and don't agree with me. I don't know these people nor am I familiar with their accounts, but they get some kind of perverse pleasure out of following my threads and entering my stream with slurs, attacks, and irrational tirades.

Almost without exception, these trolls oppose me politically, and that's fine. But the intense hatred spewed by many of them is disruptive, highly offensive, and completely out of line.

There is a particularly rabid one who should be in jail or in a padded cell-- again, no hyperbole. If I were to post screen grabs of his avatars, messages, and profile photos, you'd literally want to gag. My own husband couldn't get through them. Unfortunately, catching sight of them is unavoidable when they're in my stream or when I go to block and report.

Imagine the most frantically vile, graphic images depicting blatant racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, bigotry, and self-loathing. They include explicit close-up photos of defecation and the most hard-core XXX porn you can imagine, abominable references, every kind of debasement of women and young men, degrading photos of celebrities and our president and first lady, you name it.

And the crude, twisted tweets he sends me match the vulgar visuals. He has also opened accounts using my likeness (taken from my Twitter account), as well as those of other high-profile liberals like Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead, John Fugelsang, Bill Maher, and Rosie O'Donnell, among others.

In short, he is an obsessed, deranged, seething, hostile, psychologically impotent (and likely, physically) conservative coward who consistently targets progressives, mostly women. Here are semi-cleaned up, edited grabs of two of his tamer suspended accounts. Trust me when I say, they get much worse than these:

Here is one of his defunct profile pages

A tweet he sent out under my name and avi

This is one reason I stay anonymous. It started when a stalker came to close, sending me a Google map of my neighborhood, so that was that.

This person has been suspended well over 500 times. I've reported him to Twitter well over 100 times, and finally contacted my local authorities as well as the FBI more than once. But because he didn't threaten my life, they did nothing. As I type this, he's added at least three more Twitter accounts that I'm aware of.

I've endured this for years, literally. Because of this, I felt it was time to put out a call to action. Perhaps if enough of us demand more oversight from Twitter, especially those of us who are sick to death of being barraged with disgustingly offensive messages and photos, then maybe Twitter will take notice and do something.

It's unimaginable that they can't devise a better system to rid Twitter of such filth.

By the way, when I tried to fill out one of their complaint forms, I didn't have a link to the offending tweet, so the form wouldn't go through. I didn't have a link because I blocked him, and the account was immediately suspended so the tweet was no longer accessible. So I'm snail mailing them, and I'm including about two dozen graphic screen shots of 93 of the suspended profiles I've captured.

Here is the tweet:

"I'd like to take a 12 in figurine of a smiling G W. Bush and ram it up your stinking communist ass."

Please share this post and contact Twitter. It's worth a shot to at least try to turn things around for once. I'm fed up with having to so much as glance at the malignancies that come my way.

Thank you.

Twitter contact information:

Twitter, Inc. 1355 Market St, Suite 900 San Francisco, CA 94103

And to Twitter users, some general contact info, not that it will do much good:

@Support

@Twitter

@Spam

To file a ticket, go here.

To report an abusive or offensive user, go here.

UPDATE: Here is a sample letter sent by one of my favorite commenters:

Twitter, Inc 1355 Market St., Suite 900 San Francisco CA 94103

Attn: Dick Costolo, CEO

Dear Sir:

I’ve become more and more alarmed by the threatening, harassing tweets bombarding people like GottaLaff and urge you to take them seriously. One man who sends one tweet after another threatening her, even sending her a map of her neighborhood, forced her to resort to using a pseudonym on Twitter and he still doesn’t stop.

Spam is bad enough but when one is verbally bashed and/or threatened it is not to Twitter’s benefit and such tweets should not be ignored. Just reporting or blocking them isn’t sufficient to stop their abuse; they simply open a new account under a different name - as you know.

Surely Twitter can trace an account back to an IP address and demand that they cease such dangerous behavior. I understand that tweets can be sent from IP addresses that are used by many people (at cafes, for instance) but there is such a thing as product liability. I’m urging you to hold the owners of such IP addresses responsible for the damage their users do. Even bar owners who serve people after they are drunk are held responsible for the damage their customers do.

I’ve enjoyed Twitter for a few years and want to continue to do so but such threatening behavior makes a pleasant experience completely abhorrent and there’s a limit to the amount of such behavior I, and others, will accept.

Please develop a policy to identify & ban such people from the Twitter feed.

Top markets for internet porn: Red states win!

By GottaLaff

Mirror, mirror, on the ceiling, who are the biggest porn lovers of all?

Which Americans are the sneak-a-peek geeks?

Who whines and screams at the evil letters "XXX" while hunkered over the come-hither glow of their trusty laptops in a dark room late at night while the kids are asleep?

Why, the very people who condemn birth control, marriage equality, and momentary flashes of nipple on network Tee Vee!

Gimme an H! Gimme a Y! Gimme a P! Gimme an OCRISY! Whaddya got? HYPOCRISY!

Published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a report released earlier this year entitled "Red Light States: Who Buys Adult Entertainment" highlights where the revenues for pornographic entertainment on the Internet actually come from. According to AVN Media Network , Internet sales are the second largest piece of the $12.6 billion adult entertainment industry, drawing $2.84 billion in 2006.

Go view the slide show.

Oh, and don't worry, it's rated G.

H/t: Babzter

UPDATE via mfpdx, they win for unwed mothers, pregnant teens, and divorce, too:

Chart of the Day: Red States, Blue States, and Morality

Study: Utah Leads Nation in Online Porn Purchases, Sales Higher Nationwide in Religious Areas

By GottaLaff

Hyp. O. Crites, Inc.:

A study of the online porn purchases nationwide by Harvard Business School uncovered something surprising (or maybe not). Residents of right-wing religious areas purchase more porn than those in liberal areas:

Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” [Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School] says.

I'm not surprised. Are you surprised? I'm not surprised. I already said that, but I said it again for emphasis.

And guess which religion appears to be the most porn-obsessed? Yup, Mormons:

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Repressed much, righties?

Of course, this study was done by the Harvard Business School, so we should completely discount it. We all know that they're all nothing but a bunch of gay atheist sex addicts with nothing better to do than... reveal the truth.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11 percent more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

Let's recap:

Rightie wingnuts: Gay = bad. Porn = dandy.

Let me rephrase that:

Healthy, loving same-sex relationships = Immoral sexual behavior.

X-rated online voyeurism = Religious Rightie version of monogamous, hetero loving relationships.

Moral: If you vote Republican and pray a lot, you get to regularly enjoy the company of your favorite cyber boinkers, as long as you condemn it publicly.

For more on the study, go here

H/t: Wendy

SEC Report: Employees Browsed Porn, Ran Private Businesses

By GottaLaff

Get the kids out of the room:

The report, released the day after Thanksgiving, reveals that some employees at the [Securities and Exchange Commission ] were clearly preoccupied with matters other than their mission of "protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets." The semi-annual report to Congress, which covers the period from this past April to September, details among other things a handful of employees circumventing internal controls to download porn. Let’s pause for some detail:

[Investigators] uncovered evidence that an employee who was still in his probationary period had used his SEC laptop computer to attempt to access Internet websites classified as containing pornography, resulting in hundreds of access denials. The OIG investigation also disclosed that this employee successfully bypassed the Commission’s Internet filter by using a flash drive.

Presumably, that’s not the kind of initiative the SEC is looking for.

They don't call them "laptops" for nothing. Is that your flash drive, or are you just happy to see me?

There were also more serious misdeeds raised by the report. For example, there is the case of the senior-level commission employee who "clearly and purposefully identified herself as a Commission employee when dealing with brokers about a family member’s account," making the broker in question feel like she was trying to "intimidate and bully him." The OIG referred the matter to management for "disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal." By the end of the period covered in the report, management "had not proposed or taken action." [...]

Investigators found employees in separate offices operated private photography businesses out of the commission:

An employee repeatedly and flagrantly used Commission resources, including Commission Internet access, e-mail, telephone and printer, in support of his private photography business for several years.

[...] The report reveals also that two commission staffers employed as attorneys didn’t have active bar memberships. [...]

The IG also found that the commission did not have a sufficient system in place to "prevent and detect insider trading on the part of Commission employees or violations of the Commission’s rules."

The agency’s information management also comes in for criticism. An employee survey conducted by the inspector general revealed that employees failed to enter data into a computer system used to manage investigations. [...] The IG semi-annual report also reveals that the commission lacks "an inventory of its laptops and was unable to trace ownership of laptops to specific individuals."

Kinda takes the "security" out of Security and Exchange, doesn't it?

Go here for the 95-page document.