Yesterday I wrote my first petition for Change.org instead of just signing them. It's a request to invest effort to reduce conditions that result in reactivity and seed distrust and suspicion in people and conversations online and off. To make the online environment of Twitter a kinder, safer place to be for all ages.
I wish the suggested changes would eliminate online reactivity altogether. I know they won't, though it would be a welcome addition to recent policy revisions in response to complaints. For example, see Online sexism is so out of control that we can no longer ignore it by Yvette Cooper in the Guardian. It remains to be seen how Twitter will enforce the new policy.
Consider signing my petition. If people can design drones, driverless cars and send spaceships to the moon, the minds that created Twitter should be able to find a way. For #HumanRights. For the sake of each individual on the planet.
The text of the petition:
Petitioning Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Request Twitter Clean Up its Problem with Pornography
There are real men, women and children behind Twitter accounts. Twitter's environment should be safe for all ages. Yet, as already was noted by Mashable in 2009, Twitter has a porn problem. Porn bots and pornographic photos can appear unbidden out of nowhere and subvert conversations and reputations. In view of the increasing ways Internet users are monitored by the National Security Agency and corporations, we do not have reasonable navigational control over what we and our children encounter.
Relying on users to block accounts with explicit pornographic material only corrects the problem after harm has been done, especially in the case of children. Even for adults the prevalence and haphazard encounters with pornography can be anxiety-inducing, cause blaming of and incite volatile reactivity among a variety of groups, including women (whether feminist or not), men's right advocates, and men and women of other countries with different moral boundaries.
Either block pornography altogether or make changes to allow for user preferences. Child-safety locks and account preference settings, similar to movie ratings, needn't interfere with free speech and could easily be factored into search results, along with context specific interpretation of hashtags, and preference settings for accessibility to other accounts to reduce or avoid unexpected encounters with sexually explicit material.
It's time for Twitter to make an effort to fall in line with common sense standards instead of risking our children's mental stability, increasing the potential for misogyny, and increasing the risk for, if not silencing, women.
