In a glorious month where the relentless heat of summer has punished my not insubstantial face by turning it a deep shade of burnished crimson and my axillary perspiration has permanently defaced my collection of jazz polo-necks – I was considering a period of convalescent aestivation to return my torrid grey matter to its former glorious equilibrium.
Having made my case to the dictators of my professional fate, which resulted in being dubbed both ‘ridiculous’ and ‘delusional’, I am now deeply medicated and at your service once more to deliver another quivering shaft of social media beef.
Following a comprehensive and difficult restructure of their distribution centres at the beginning of the month, Tesco’s Logistics Director for the UK & Ireland, Steve Strachota ensured he was crossed off a number of Christmas card lists by posting a congratulatory motivational tweet on the day over a thousand members of staff lost their jobs.
When the issue had been flagged up to Robert Halfon, the MP for one of the worst affected constituencies in Harlow, he tabled an early day motion inviting the House of Commons to express their concern that the message seemed to be celebrating the job losses and chastised Tesco for their callous treatment of long serving employees. Tesco employed the standard process of backtracking, apologising and removing the offending tweet, leaving yet another paludal soup of red faces, mitigating circumstances and fawning contrition in their wake.
When Lady Godiva rode through the streets of Coventry in the altogether, all those years ago, I’ll wager she didn’t bank on being immortalised in the cockney-rhyming slang for a five-pound note. Unfortunately, this lack of gender bias found in the humble cockney, was conspicuous by its absence when deciding who should go on the back of the new ten-pound note. After some tireless campaigning by Caroline Criado-Perez, however, some positive social evolution took place and Jane Austen was announced proudly without prejudice as Charles Darwin’s replacement on the back of the Ayrton Senna.
This sweet victory soon turned very sour when literally minutes after the announcement was made, her Twitter account was littered with foul abuse and threats of rape which were reported immediately to the police as malicious communications. Labour MP Stella Creasy was next in line for a Twitter attack when she came up against similar personal threats of sexual violence when she publically supported Ms. Criado-Perez’s crusade.
At the time of writing the abuse was still coming thick and fast to both of these accounts, as was the public outrage at the lack of action by Twitter, who were bombarded with accusations of weakness and irresponsibility in how they were dealing with the issue. This was accompanied by mounting pressure on them to build a more robust and transparent third-party notification system into their platform, so abusive and sexually violent threats can be dealt with in a more effective and expedient fashion and the perpetrators brought to book.
Those in opposition to a report abuse button on Twitter are worried that free speech – the very lifeblood of the platform – will be compromised and ultimately signal its demise, but as Stella Creasy points out, “Free speech is incredibly important on and offline, but it’s not free speech for someone to be threatened with rape”.
New moderation initiatives always tend to cause fear among seasoned users who think that any kind of reactive intervention will destroy the essence of what made the community successful in the first place; however, experience tells us that if third-party notifications are managed intelligently and prioritised clearly, malicious criminality and public or personal threats will be escalated and dealt with at the earliest opportunity, while spurious submissions by people attempting to game the system for their own ends will be ignored.
It’s quite clear that the importance of user safety and the right of the individual to live without fear of being threatened publically or privately with violent retribution for their opinions, outweighs any minor and transient impact the implementation of some balanced human reactive moderation will have on Twitter’s continued success and popularity as a social media platform.
In other news, Pope Francis embraced social media this month, in a wonderful and unfortunately much mocked papal decree stating that Catholics unable to attend the 28th World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, could receive the Plenary Indulgence once a day during the proceedings, provided they “(follow) the same rites and spiritual exercises as they occur via television or radio or, with due devotion, via the new means of social communication”.
Many people who took this movement with the times by the Catholic Church at face value, didn’t read the small-print and wrongly assumed that the faithful simply had to follow the Twitter feed passively in order to receive the indulgences and cynically painted it out to be a risibly shallow attempt to endear themselves to young people. In reality, the indulgence would only be obtained through devoted, sincere piety and dedicated participation in the full proceedings, when followed on social or other media.
Many may disagree, but I think the adoption of a modern communications medium, by a church known for its reluctance to change and embrace the new, can only be a positive thing.
Now, as I am almost certainly pontificating myself into an indefinite stay in purgatorial incarceration, the time has come once again for me to bring this month’s chapter to a close; until I see you again, ave atque vale.
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