Twitter is so ‘toxic’ that Amnesty International is enlisting a ‘Troll Patrol’ to help police it
The project follows Amnesty’s #ToxicTwitter report, which detailed the results of a 16-month long investigation into how harassers and abusers target women on the social media platform
By Katie Canales
Amnesty International is taking it upon itself to help police harassment on Twitter.
On Wednesday, the human rights organisation commenced with Troll Patrol,” a project which will recruit volunteers to find and analyse potentially abusive tweets directed at female journalists, activists and politicians.
In the short term, the idea is to sift for patterns in these abusive or harmful tweets, and publish the findings. Amnesty’s long-term goal is to use these classified tweets to build an algorithm that Twitter could potentially use to automatically detect abusive tweets without human intervention.
“The more evidence we have to show Twitter how large this problem is and how it affects women of different identities in particular — ideally that will just all put pressure on the company to meet our cause and our demands for the #ToxicTwitter campaign and to show that this is an issue that they are going to take concrete action on,” Azmina Dhordia, technology and gender researcher at Amnesty International, told Business Insider.
The #ToxicTwitter campaign she mentions is a report, released two weeks ago, condemning Twitter for not taking users’ claims of harassment seriously. It’s a 77-page study detailing the results of a 16-month long investigation of how women on Twitter experience online abuse.