Exceptions
It’s bad to threaten and/or attack writers to punish them for what they write.
Mostly.
If the writer is JK Rowling though…
Writer Joanne Harris is facing calls to resign as chairman of the Society of Authors after she was accused of mocking JK Rowling with a ‘tasteless’ Twitter poll about death threats.
After tweeting her support for Sir Salman Rushdie in the wake of his stabbing on Friday, Rowling received this response: ‘Don’t worry, you are next.’
Police are now investigating a report of an ‘online threat’ made to Rowling. Harris, 58, wrote: ‘Fellow-authors… have you ever received a death threat (credible or otherwise).’
The response options were ‘Yes’, ‘Hell, yes’, ‘No, never’ and ‘Show me, dammit’, suggesting scepticism about how serious the threats were. Writer Julie Bindel said it was ‘disgustingly inappropriate’.
And novelist Simon Edge described the poll, which was later deleted and replaced with an alternative version, as ‘indefensible’ and said it’s ‘high time’ the Chocolat author stepped down.
It’s almost as if we don’t know in advance which threats are serious and which are just noise.
The death threat came from an Iran-supporting Islamic extremist called Meer Asif Aziz, based in Karachi, who described himself on Twitter as a ‘student, social activist, political activist and research activist’.
What kind of “activist”?
Rowling had expressed her horror at the attack on Rushdie, and activist dude replied with “you’re next” haw haw geddit?
She also revealed that after
reporting[she reported] the vile threat to Twitter, the social media network responded decided that the extremist did not violate the rules.The email from Twitter read: ‘After reviewing the available information, we determined that there were no violations of the Twitter rules in the content you reported. We appreciate your help and encourage you to reach out again in the future if you see any potential violations.’
Rowling posted a screenshot of the response, commenting: ‘These are your guidelines, right? “Violence: You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence… “Terrorism/violent extremism: You may not threaten or promote terrorism”…’
Why did Twitter decide the threat was no violation of its rules? I don’t know. Is it because Twitter thinks JKR deserves to be threatened? I don’t know. I don’t understand their thinking at all.
Harris on the other hand is all too clear.
In 2020, 58 writers, journalists and actors signed a letter in the Sunday Times in support of Rowling, condemning the ‘onslaught of abuse’ she had received after expressing her views on gender.
Three days later, Harris was among more than 200 figures who published a statement in support of trans and non-binary people and their rights.
Implying of course that JKR was opposed to those rights.
There is no rationalily to this Rowling Hatred. She is a Declared Enemy of the People and a Suppresive Person, which justifies any harm done to her. There is an undeclared fatwa against her, but it’s enforceable even still. It doesn’t matter what she’s said, or what’s been written or tweeted, she deserves what she gets.
Violence has been justified in response to hurt feelings, even if, as in Rushdie and Rowling’s cases, they did nothing wrong. It’s the accusation that they did which counts for the evidence.
The problem is that when you report abuse to Twitter, the report does not go to Parag Agrawal.
The report goes to an overworked, overstressed, poorly paid screener somewhere in Iowa, or Mumbai, or maybe Karachi–wherever the labor rate is lowest.
The screeners spend their lives crawling through all the dreck on Twitter that is bad enough that someone takes the time and trouble to actually report it. Their biggest concern is not whether something is a threat. Their biggest concern is that if they do not keep clearing these reports fast enough then the automated software that tracks their every keystroke will flag them and then their supervisor will come by to tell them that they need to up their game or they are going to be turfed out of a job with no way to pay their rent or feed their children.
The screeners may not have much context. They’ve probably never heard of Salman Rushdie. If they’ve heard of JK Rowling, all they know is that she wrote the Harry Potter books.
The screener has a window that displays a tweet, and two big buttons: red/green, yes/no, abuse/not abuse, whatever. Their job is to read the tweet and push one of those two buttons. The tweet says “Don’t worry, you are next.”. They don’t see any swear words; they don’t see any sexual terms; they don’t see “gun” or “knife” or “kill”; they don’t see an overt threat. They push the green button and move on.
Layered on top of this is a corporate superstructure that knows that outrage drives engagement; engagement drives clicks, and clicks drive advertising revenue. They know that actually fixing this problem will kill the entire company. So they just keep doing what they are doing and treat any fallout as a P.R. problem.
Adding to what Steven said:
I served as a moderator for two unrelated online forums at different times. The rules established (not by me) for deciding that a post warranted deletion, or was cause for action against the poster, specifically rejected context. If there was a problem, it had to be contained in the text of the post, it couldn’t refer to a pattern or a series. So, not only was context not considered, it was against the moderation rules to consider context.
Given this experience, I fully expect Twitter’s moderation rules to reject or minimize the use of context.
Maybe Twitter reports go first to a computer that can “see” only the words of the reported Tweet, with no way to judge context. “Don’t worry, you are next” doesn’t contain any of the words that a computer is likely to have been programmed to respond to.
I don’t know if that’s really how it works, but that was my guess.
Harris pretended her little poll had nothing no nothing to do with Rowling. She was just wondering how many of her fellow authors had received death threats, and later realized that gee maybe her tone was a tad inappropriate.
Not content to be merely a diseased genital, she’s a cowardly diseased genital.