Every 30 Secs, A Woman Is Abused On Twitter; Facebook Allowed Microsoft To Access Private Messages
When will we be entitled to respect and privacy?
Was it not enough that women had to face abuse in their workspace, their house, their travel routes, and the society in general, that social media is also now a platform to look out from? Every 30 seconds, a woman is abused on Twitter.
Amnesty International International and AI software startup Element AI, conducted a survey known as Troll Patrol. This survey led to the conclusion that, every 30 seconds, a woman is abused on Twitter.
Contents
What is Troll Patrol?
Milena Marin, Senior Advisor for Tactical Research at Amnesty International says, “Troll Patrol means we have the data to back up what women have long been telling us – that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny, and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked.”
Troll Patrol is a unique crowdsourcing project used to analyze data available in bulk online to find statistics of online abuse. Around 6,500 people from 150 different countries volunteered to take part in the Troll Patrol. These volunteers sifted through 288,000 tweets directed at 778 women politicians and journalists in the regions of USA and UK in 2017.
Statistics and reports of Troll Patrol:
- During the year of study, i.e. 2017, women were sent around 1.1 million tweets mentioning 778 women that can be categorized as abusive or problematic.
- Black women were targeted more: they were 84% more likely to be hit with abusive tweets.
- Women of other race and colour (Asian, Latinx, black, etc.) were 34% more likely to be included in abusive or problematic tweets.
Read the detailed report here.
Twitter is a platform where everyone has the freedom to express their opinions and views. But, people have to remember that this freedom ends where someone else’s feelings and self-respect starts.
Another breach of information by Facebook?
Speaking of invading personal spaces, Facebook now seems to think it can share users’ personal messages with Netflix and Spotify and get away with it. While previously, Facebook openly admitted to the leak of users’ personal data including contact numbers of users’ friends, and private messages with technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon.
Explanation by Facebook:
Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships, Facebook, gave out an explanation wherein, Facebook just requires ‘Read/Write/Delete’ Access for writing a message, reading a message, or deleting one to their friend on Spotify.
He said, “No third party was reading your private messages or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct.”
He also explained that these experiments and partnerships were aborted about three years ago and the access is not automatically available, but only if the user permits.
After the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Facebook was expected to have better sense than this!
