As of today, I decided to put both my accounts to a “private” state. This means only people that I follow and that follow me will be able to read my tweets. It’s the result of a small and unimportant harassment incident that made me realize how shitty the service really is when you need support.
A week ago I received my first harassment tweet by a politically differently oriented person. In Germany, the content of the tweet might already fulfill some elements of an legal offence.
To take action on this, I did what Twitter suggests: I reported the profile that contained a lot more similar tweets of some were way worse to Twitter. I reported it as a matter of my personal security being affected, as, again, suggested.
Six hours later I got an automated email that the case has been reviewed:
Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely.
We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter’s Rules regarding abusive behavior (https://twitter.com/rules).
Over the last year I’ve heard similar stories from various persons and many of them suffered from much worse harassment. But naturally you don’t care too much until you experience this in some way on your own.
To make a sign, I today set both my Twitter accounts to private, effectively limiting my audience to my approved followers. Additionally, I decided to not tweet much myself anymore from now on. This is an experiment but I’ll try.
I don’t want to support a service that does not even try to limit harassment.