I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform…

I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1

Twitter and other social media mostly regulate behaviour using a customer service type of system. Individuals mostly have to complain, and if you're lucky claims are investigated, though rarely quickly. Sometimes algorithms moderate content, and sometimes actual moderators.../2

...are employed, but given the volume of information daily, it's all a bit tokenistic. Other Twitter users can also report Tweets that seem to violate rules, but again that's very hit and miss. I wonder if the community itself can be more active in regulating what goes on. /3

For example, many trolls are serial offenders who constantly harass people. But their victims often have to try to deal with them alone. And the offenders know it, even if they're banned they'll reappear almost instantly with new or other accounts, behaviour unchanged. /4

Some are also paid agents, of government or corporations or other interests, to try to manipulate and control community discussions. In a nutshell, while the platform is designed as if it's all a lovely free world of individuals expressing their points of view, an embodiment.../5

...of simplistic, fantasy views of what 'democracy' is, in reality bad people mobilise extensively in collective ways, and good people are often vastly outnumbered because they're trying to deal with the scum on their own. So I wonder, in what ways could the good people.../6

...mobilise in more community-type ways, to tip the balance a bit more the other way? It's not easy, because you also don't want more lynch mobs. It has to be evidence-based, not just 'this person is a dickhead, everybody block him'. And you don't want people excluded only.../7

...because they have a set of views others don't agree with either. It's more about etiquette, basic community behaviour. Also cultural, because in some places each person aggressively vomiting out their personal opinion is considered ideal, and the idea of a community.../8

...regulating any speech at all is anathema. So no easy way forward here, the platform obviously has to be able to cater for a variety of possibilities. And maybe others are already aware of ways these problems have been worked with, within Twitter. /9

I'm aware other platforms have been set up as new utopias free of the troll-type behaviour, I'm not so interested in those. They're good for those who want them. But maybe for example, if a person encounters appalling behaviour, they can share it simply as a way of saying.../10

...'be aware of this'. Then others can block, report etc, and it becomes more a community action than individual action. It gains scale and effectiveness, without being a lynch mob because it's still up to each person to decide how to act. I know this already.../11

...happens, but if there were better ways to get this sort of thing to scale, trolls would face a more collective resistance. They have nothing of interest to share themselves, they feed upon the Tweets of others. So starving them of that raw material. /12

There may be no way to do this without it running the risk of persecution and witch-hunts, who knows, but I am very interested in viewing social media as a community rather than as an aggregate of millions of separate individuals. Thoughts or examples, anybody? /end