17.7. Design and Harassment#

The way social media sites are designed can encourage and discourage different forms of harassment.

For example, people have made complaints about how Quote Tweets Have Turned Us All Into Jerks. And the way that even trying to defend people can increase the harassment they face. See the article: It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter: The design of the internet lets you harass and harm people without ever once interacting with them directly. Even if you’re trying to defend them.

When creating the Twitter-like social media protocol Mastodon, its creator, Eugen Rochko, decided not to allow quote-tweet like posts:

I’ve made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for “good” like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank’s

Eugen

But others have argued that design decisions and community decisions made on Mastodon, such as no quotes, and their content-warning system have made it more outwardly polite. But they also complain that this has made the platform very white, hostile to people of color talking about experiences of racism, and difficult to make a social movement.

@mekkaokereke@mastodon.cloud questions:

Is it possible to drive social change through Mastodon? Could “Black Lives Matter” have happened on Mastodon? Or do the “intentionally slow, pleasant conversation” features eliminate the possibility of this? Do the “interest silo” tendencies discourage cross pollination?

[…]

I know that we can have more pleasant interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. I already feel it.

What I’m unsure of, is if that means giving up on the capacity for social change. Are we Lotus eating?

And Dr. Jonathan Flowers argues:

The quote tweet function in conjunction with the hashtag are what allow users to align with communities, and communities with conversations through how they enable cultural practices by means of a digital environment.

On Black Twitter, the quote tweet and hashtag enable what Black cultural scholars call “call and response,” something crucial to Black community practices. The hashtags curate the conversation and allow for its visibility.

Writer Leslie Ye argued about some of the advantages of what Twitter:

many of us have spent our lives observing institutional power from the outside, how power behaves, how power acts, when confronted when communities like ours who are actually able to HOLD power to account, connect the dots across expertises and specialties

[…]

[Twitter] is a place where we have direct access to the most powerful and can hold them to account

17.7.1. Reflection Questions#

  • How does social media design enable or reduce harassment?

  • What can you lose in trying to reduce harassment?

  • How do you balance these different concerns?