How many of you have seen The Jimmy Kimmel Show segment Mean Tweets? I admit, some of it is pretty funny. But for some of us, mean tweets can be degrading and even life threatening.
Twitter is making it easier to report abusive posts. Due to it’s new rule, Twitter will let you report up to five abusive posts. When they’re are more abusive posts, it will give to Twitter a better chance to take action and what action to take. This has been months in the making. Earlier this year, Twitter strengthened his it’s anti-abuse policy and vows to crack down on everything from violent threats to copyright violations. Maybe this is the wake of outcries that Twitter isn’t doing enough to protect their 320 million views. The new abuse policies aren’t yet viewed on Twitter, but it will be.
I have mixed reactions on this one. First, Twitter should NOT be a place to deliver threats of violence, to threaten lives, to start fights, to threaten somebody’s family and close friends. Nobody should be using Twitter to blackmail, extort, hack or use it for a sextortion tool. And Twitter should definitely not be a tool to promote or commit or brag about acts of terrorism and mass shootings. The cowards who hide behind alias names and commits such actions should be shut down, and probably criminally prosecuted. In facts, most of these acts can be prosecuted. So there’s that. But equally is concerning to me is the overt and overdone political correctness. Sometimes a ‘mean tweet’ could be a criticism, a disagreement, or a not so politically correct joke. When I hear Jimmy Kimmel’s mean tweets, most of them fall into the latter category. This is where this generation needs to lighten up and toughen up. But Twitter needs to draw a line between real mean tweets and just tweets that may be taken the wrong way. If you ran Twitter’s anti-abuse policy, where would you draw the line?