Saturday, July 27, 2013

The Twitter tigress takes on the trolls

Homage to suffragists overshadowed by barrage of rape abuse



On July 26, 1913, fifty thousand women congregated in Hyde Park to try to persuade the public and the government that women should be given the vote.

They had set out from all corners of the country up to a month before, and had held meetings and handed out pamphlets in towns and villages along the way. Some forty thousand people were in Hyde Park to greet them and listen courteously to what they had to say. A score of platforms were set up around the park and speakers, male and female, found willing converts to their cause. There were no disturbances.

On July 26, 2013, two women appeared on the radio to try to persuade the public and the government that women should be entitled to respect and to have their place in society recognised.

They had been fighting their separate campaigns - one successful, one ongoing - not in village halls, but in the new community meeting place: Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to the programmes, but not all wanted to hear what they had to say. One of them had to deal with some gentle mockery at the time. Later there were serious disturbances for both.

This afternoon women have again gathered in Hyde Park to celebrate that pilgrimage of a century ago. They include some who have spent the past week walking from Brighton. Others will have taken part in shorter walks around the country to show their solidarity and respect. As in 1913, there will be speakers - one of them the very woman who was mocked on the radio yesterday.

SubSist wrote yesterday that the feminist cause seemed to have regressed half a century. Why should women still have to put up with being hassled and groped as they go about their daily business?

Reading reports of the 1913 rally and the Twitter feeds of 2013,  it is clear that we have regressed not back to the 1960s, but to the dark ages.

Laura Bates had appeared on the Jeremy Vine Show to discuss her Everyday Sexism Project, which encourages people - not only women - to register verbal and physical attacks. It was particularly relevant as the day marked the end of an inspiring week-long operation in conjunction with the British Transport Police aimed out at stamping unacceptable sexual behaviour on buses and trains.

The initiative for Project Guardian had come from the BTP, in conjunction with Scotland Yard and Transport for London. Officers were trained up and ready to listen and understand and take action where necessary. It was a true landmark day and their efforts were much appreciated by women who had previously  held back from reporting incidents for fear of being fobbed off - or of making an unwarranted fuss.


Sadly, the Jeremy Vine interview did not mention that project. It quickly got bogged down in skirmishes about whether a man could approach a woman he didn't know and pay her a compliment, or kiss a woman he'd just met on the cheek in a show of gratitude. Vine seemed more concerned about establishing the boundary of what was acceptable - for the benefit of men - than about moving to the more serious issues of physical interference in the crush on the Tube.

Bates remained calm throughout.

Caroline Criado-Perez had given a number of radio interviews over the previous couple of days in which she sought to explain why she was so concerned that women should appear on British banknotes and to celebrate the confirmation that Jane Austen would be the face of the next £10 note.

Criado-Perez seems a little more volatile.

Yesterday's SubSist post pointed out the benefits of social media in getting a message across to great numbers of people quickly - as evidenced by the Everyday Sexism Project, by End Victim Blaming and by Project Guardian.

These just happen to relate to feminist issues. Twitter is also helpful in putting people who - for any one of countless reasons - are in need of support in touch with each other and with appropriate experts. Charities understand its importance and make good use of it. Leaders of the world from Obama and Putin to the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury tweet.

And so do the bad guys. Or, if the above four aren't to your political taste, the really bad guys.

The first set of tweets below, sent during the radio programme, are relatively mild.


But Bates has also received others that are far more menacing:





Bates appears to have ignored or blocked the aggressors. Criado-Perez fights back like a tigress. A foul-mouthed tweet is liable to illicit an equally foul-mouthed withering reply. As she says, she doesn't do silence; she will 'shout the **** back'.

Criado-Perez reports that she has been subjected to three days of rape threats and abuse since the Jane Austen £10 note decision was announced. She has contacted the police, tried to rouse Twitter authorities, and written about the experience for New Statesman, in a blogpost and apparently for tomorrow's Independent on Sunday.

It is not necessary to reproduce the tweets here, as some were in the previous post and others can be seen in the links above. Whether this aggressive abuse constitutes rape threats is a matter of debate. What is certain is that it goes way beyond 'trolling'.

This isn't a question of censorship or freedom of speech. We wouldn't tolerate tweets saying 'that nigger should be strung up on a tree' (I apologise even for writing such a thing) even if the author had no intention of doing anything other than be provocative or draw attention to themselves. So it is with the vile abuse addressed at Criado-Perez. It may be idle baiting or late-night drink talking, but it is still inciting hatred. That is against British criminal law and common sense says that it should also be outlawed by Twitter.

It is possible to set up a Twitter account so that a user receives an email or text notification whenever they are mentioned. The email messages have a panel at the bottom saying 'If you believe xxx is engaging in abusive behaviour on Twitter you may report xxx for spam.' The last four words are a hyperlink that automatically block the user.

If you do not receive such notifications, there is no easy way to report abuse. Last night Criado-Perez and many of her followers tried to contact Mark S. Luckie, Twitter's manager of journalism and news, but he sealed his account. A petition was swiftly set up calling for Twitter to incorporate a 'report abuse' button on every feed and now has some ten thousand signatures.

By this morning, the outrage had grown, with even John Prescott joining in the outcry. Half an hour or so ago the UK head of Twitter finally put his head above the parapet with this tweet:


It took seven days for Facebook to capitulate to Bates's campaign over violent images last month. It can't be hard to add a 'report abuse' element to the 'more' button that allows users to email or embed a tweet, so it will be interesting to see if Twitter - until now regarded as more user-friendly of the two giants - acts as quickly.






Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please do leave your thoughts on this post. Thank you.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)