by Olivia Feld, san francisco
20 DECEMBER 2018
(extract)
"Shares in Twitter have fallen by more than 12pc after a short seller accused the company of being "The Harvey Weinstein of social media" for failing to deal with harassment.
The note by Citron Research called the company toxic to investors and advertisers after a damning report by the human rights organisation Amnesty International which laid bare the scale of abuse on the social network.
“The culture of hate and anonymity should have Twitter trade at a discount to its closest peer, not a 100pc premium”, it said.
“The hate on Twitter is real and the company is not taking proper steps to curb the problem. Citron believes this story has just begun and advertisers will be forced to make more morality-based brand building decisions.”
Soon after the report was published Twitter’s share price tumbled. The company's failure to crack down on hateful and abusive messages has been an ongoing problem despite repeated efforts to tackle trolls.
On Tuesday, Amnesty released a report with Element AI, a software company, which found that 7pc, or 1.1 million tweets, sent to women in the UK and US last year were “problematic” or “abusive”. Women of colour were 34pc more likely to be mentioned in offensive tweets than white women." (continues)
The report analysed 228,000 tweets sent to 778 female politicians and journalists. Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, called on the San Francisco-based company to take action over "highly offensive racist and misogynist" abuse on the platform.
Abusive content violates Twitter’s own rules, said the report which defined problematic content as anything which is "hurtful or hostile, especially if repeated to an individual on multiple or cumulative occasions".
Twitter responded saying that it is publicly committed to improving the health, openness and civility of public conversation on its service. It's abusive behavior policy prohibits harassment, intimidation and silencing of users voices.
"Twitter uses a combination of machine learning and human review to adjudicate abuse reports and whether they violate our rules,” said Twitter's Vijaya Gadde." (continues)
www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/12/20/twitter-shares-tumble-short-seller-calls-harvey-weinstein-social/
Twitter does not list sex as a protected characteristic, so sexism cannot be easily reported within their reporting procedures