Hakuna Matata. What a wonderful phrase. It means no worries for the rest of your – @simba DIE U STUPID LION UR SONG IS SHIT.
That was a short representation of one the alleged reasons why Walt Disney Co. opted out of bidding for Twitter last night. Despite hiring two investment banks to help them weigh up a deal, Disney have dropped out of the running partly because – according to Bloomberg – of the social networks’s reputation for bullying and harassment, as well as its falling profits. Individuals close to Disney management allegedly told the business news website that Twitter did not fit well for the company, which, after all, is more famous for feel-good anthropomorphic animals than angry, anonymous eggs.
Those who mistakenly believe Twitter is a happy place where ev’rybody wants to be a cat might need an explanation. Despite the apparent abundance of cat gifs, Twitter can be a violent and angry social network – a report last year stated that 88 per cent of the abusive mentions on social media happen on the site. Twitter has long struggled to stop abuse overwhelming discussion on the social network. This has fed the perception among some of its 300 million users that tackling abuse is a low priority, with efforts at reducing trolling overshadowed by the release of new features such as increased message length and curated news feeds known as Moments. Because of this, the site has become seen as – in one former employee’s words – “a honeypot for assholes.” Oh, bother.
Earlier this year, Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones was bombarded with racist tweets upon the film’s release, forcing her to leave the site for a few weeks. “Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines,” she wrote. The company did take action in the wake of the Jones case, permanently banning the prominent right-wing journalist and notorious troll, Milo Yiannopoulos, from the site for his role in fanning the flames of the abuse. But, while Google has set up a new company, Jigsaw, to make the internet a safer place, Instagram regularly bans offensive hashtags and Facebook has devoted time to constantly updating its anti-harassment tools (most recently making it easier to report revenge porn), Twitter’s trolling problem continues.
Even Twitter’s former top employees have criticised the company’s efforts. In a leaked memo from 2015, then-CEO Dick Costolo said: “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” Earlier this year, the current CEO Jack Dorsey admitted Twitter “must do better” at dealing with abuse. Salesforce, another potential buyer, have also allegedly been put off by the site’s reputation. “The haters reduce the value of the company… I know that Salesforce was very concerned about this notion,” reported CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
I feel upset and scared. If you’re a man you can do anything. pic.twitter.com/cX7mxAPt98
— Silky (spoopy) Seal (@Peculiar_Jenny) October 16, 2016
Neither company has declared publicly that Twitter’s abuse problem dettered them from the sale, but could the loss of this latest suitor push them to take the problem more seriously? Having some sort of pre-emptive anti-harassment tool has become the bare necessities of running a successful social network, but Twitter still waits for users to report abuse and then, frequently, tells them that the abusive content actually didn’t violate their rules.
.@twitter says this does not violate Twitter rules. Neither did a more specific gender-based threat I reported. Yay. pic.twitter.com/rMhx0yuHCQ
— Dana Liebelson (@dliebelson) October 17, 2016
It is not too late for Twitter to turn itself around, as many of its users are still loyal despite the abuse. With one successful attempt to tackle harassment, a resurgence for the site could be just around the riverbend. In the words of the wise Rafiki: “Oh yes, the past can hurt. But from the way I see it, you can either run from it, or… learn from it.”
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