The Telegraph, "Twitter shares tumble after short seller calls it 'The Harvey Weinstein of social media' after sexism & misogyny identified by Amnesty

[R0wantrees]

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

Flying - It's not illegal for a short-seller (or anyone else) to release or publicize negative info about a company so long as it's factual, even when done for the explicit purpose of driving down the stock price. Making up & spreading falsehoods about a company (to manipulate the stock price or for any other reason) would be illegal, as would be using "insider" information to trade stocks.

Still, Twitter's stock tumbled, and women who were previously unaware, are now aware and learning that Twitter is misogynist. As if they did not know that, really!

Getting angrier about it too.

The money markets will do what the money markets do.

But when ordinary women withdraw their support - then you may well be left for dead.

Twitter does nothing to stop abuse against females. Why not let those who fund it through placing ads know this. It might lead to a policy change.

good

It's not just the TRA issue on Twitter, there has been a history of women being threatened and abused for all sorts of reasons - look at Gamergate, or the campaign to have a woman on a bank note.

The fact that they don't include sex as a protected characteristic tells you everything you need to know.