Twitter’s decision to suspend Martin Shkreli for harassing reporter Lauren Duca fulfills the site’s pattern of only punishing high-profile abusers as a means of silencing critics who claim Jack Dorsey and company have failed to protect vulnerable users.
Last Tuesday, writer and activist Lindy West published a column in the Guardian explaining her decision to abandon Twitter. “I’ve left Twitter,” the piece declared. “It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.” Throughout the essay, West addresses Twitter’s refusal to uphold its own Terms of Service, as well as its role as a tool of the misogynist white nationalist movement known as the alt-right, which West argues used the site as “beta-testing” for the targeted harassment that it deployed and continues to deploy against anyone who attempts to question its vile positions.
Ultimately, West made the argument that Twitter’s failure to adequately protect its users from harassment was partially responsible for the rise of Trumpism. It taught those who employed abuse as a means of political campaigning that they would be given allowances, that their “rhetoric” would be tolerated. In short, it normalized the most grotesque impulses of Trump’s movement, and facilitated the cruel tantrums of Trump himself.
Towards the end of her piece, West points out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s continued failure to understand how imperative it is that Twitter rededicate itself to expelling its most dangerous elements. In response to a user’s demand for a “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis,” Dorsey offers some dodgy bullshit about “policies and controls,” before asking for the next priority. West is having none of it, writing:
Oh, what’s our second-highest priority after Nazis? I’d say No 2 is also Nazis. And No 3. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top 100 spots. Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat-king of Nazis. Nazis are bad, you see?
Whether or not West’s powerful essay and the widespread praise it received was part of what compelled Twitter, on Sunday, to suspend Martin Shkreli—who came to prominence after price-hiking pharmaceuticals and continued to cling to infamy by his fingernails with a string of ugly stunts befitting a C-list Batman villain—for continually harassing freelance reporter Lauren Duca is unclear, though it’s easy to read the site’s sudden decision to publically address this major case of abuse as a sort of PR course correction.
Which is not to say that Shkreli’s suspension was unwarranted.
In brief, Shkreli had begun targeting Duca after she garnered praise for her piece in Teen Vogue entitled “Trump is Gaslighting America.” As explained by The Verge in their own write up of Shkreli’s suspension, the article led to a number of media appearances for Duca, including a segment with Tucker Carlson of Fox News that ultimately went viral.
After attempting to contact Duca via Twitter’s direct message function—he asked her to be his plus-one for Donald Trump’s inauguration—he intensified the harassment. Per The Verge:
Following the message, Shkreli added a line to his Twitter bio saying he had “a small crush on @laurenduca.” He also changed his profile image to a doctored photo of Duca and her husband, swapping his face into the image. He changed his banner to a collage of photos of Duca, overlaid with lyrics from John Michael Montgomery’s 1994 single “I Swear.”
Shkreli’s fanbase added to the deluge of Photoshops and face-swaps and came to his defense, trying to make the case that the shit you see stalkers do in movies like Fear and The Boy Next Door is somehow neither harassment nor abuse.
In response to the onslaught, Duca reached out to Twitter for help slightly before 11 AM on Sunday morning. Shkreli’s account was suspended roughly two hours later. So, victory, right?
Not so much.
The incident with Shkreli is not the first time that Twitter has taken action against a high profile troll. In July, the site permanently banned Breitbart stooge Milo Yiannopoulos after he spearheaded and organized the harassment of Ghostbusters and SNL star Leslie Jones. Two months prior, in May, the social network banned rapper Azealia Banks for racist comments directed at former-One Direction member Zayn Malik.
Looking at these three cases, you might be able to spot a bit of a pattern. In all three cases, the harasser has been relatively high profile. The same goes for the harassed (though, Duca is certainly not nearly as famous as either Jones or Malik).
Now, this is not to say that Duca, Jones, or Malik did not deserve to have their abuse addressed by Twitter. Each faced unconscionable harassment. Each abuser was rightly punished. Still, holding this information alongside the knowledge that Twitter’s willingness to take aggressive action against trolls is the exception and not the rule, it looks less like the suspension of a user like Shkreli or the banning of one like Yiannopoulos comes from a place of concern for the victims of this behavior and more like it comes from a calculated concern for the platform’s reputation. Because, unlike some random Twitter egg named “Deplorable Something-Or-Other,” a user like Shkreli will have his behavior widely reported on, especially if it’s directed at another prominent user. This, in turn, means that the behavior is far more likely to affect Twitter’s reputation among non-users, to shape the cultural perception of the site. And so it’s dealt with, swiftly.
What this also means is that Twitter’s decision to suspend Shkreli says absolutely nothing about any future commitment to protecting its users. It demonstrates no radical shift in policy and no notable dedication to the site’s own stated rules and regulations. While it’s tempting to read the platform’s decision to take on famous users as some sort of courage and unwillingness to allow abuse from the upper echelon, it’s important to remember that suspension and banning affect these users the least. Men like Yiannopoulos and Shkreli have other platforms to spew their hate, so losing a Twitter handle means far less to them than it might to some random troll (it also means very little to that random troll, considering how easy it is to simply make new profiles on Twitter). If anything, for someone like Yiannopoulos, being banned from Twitter might be a benefit, a boost for their hateful brand. It lets them argue that their brand of the truth is simply too punk for some people, that their rights are being infringed upon (it should go without saying that this is not how the First Amendment works). At the end of December, Yiannopoulos received a $250,000 advance from publisher Simon & Schuster, apparently by billing himself as a unique provocateur. Twitter sure showed him.
Which brings us back to West’s argument that Twitter’s refusal to take action for so long has not just hurt its user-base, but allowed the forces of abuse that incubated in those anonymous egg avatars to dig their talons in elsewhere, to spread beyond the confines of a social media URL. Trolls are getting book deals, because Twitter waited so long to take action that their own tools were ultimately useless to effectively combat the problem. By the time Yiannopoulos was banned his brand was built around the fact that he eventually might be, because (in his eyes and those of his followers) he was simply operating on a level that most people could not handle. His special trademarked monstrousness became Too Big To Fail.
At this point, most of those who spend their days and nights harassing women and LGBTQ individuals and people of color on Twitter have little interest in whether the site ultimately bans them. Their ability to grow and endure behind their handles and usernames has allowed them to build an outside world that will be hospitable to their hatred and abuse in the off-chance that Twitter follows through and kicks them out. What West calls “beta-testing,” I might call terra-forming. Anticipating the moment when Twitter is no longer the best option for their hideous rhetoric, the trolls and abusers constructed another environment that will allow and sustain it. Currently, it seems like one might call that environment “everywhere else.”
Again, one can’t actually say for certain whether West’s column and its reception encouraged Dorsey and his company to deal with Shkreli as promptly as they did. Still, whether or not the two are connected, Twitter’s response screams “too little too late.” Even if the site were to suddenly develop a desire to purge itself of abuse and harassment, it’s unlikely that much progress would be made. The users who aren’t verified would continue to make dummy accounts. They would continue to engage in their sustained campaigns of abuse. And the new celebrity class of trolls? Well, as long as culture is willing to make space for them and pay them for their hatred, they’ll continue to profit off their bile, projecting it out into the world by some means other than Twitter.
What does this mean for Twitter? I really don’t know. Can anyone possibly save the platform from what it’s become? It seems like a pleasant but unlikely fantasy. While West and others might comfortably abandon ship, many more (especially writers and journalists of color) are forced to endure the abuse in order to effectively promote themselves. It’s become a reality that Twitter’s complacency, laziness, and enabling has continually reinforced, and demanded they accept. Twitter continues to peddle itself as a social media titan, an indispensable tool in the age of digital content creation. It implicitly demands that users accept the abuse as a bug, even as it increasingly reveals itself as a built-in feature.
If something is to be done, Twitter needs to recognize that it must be done immediately. Sooner or later the rot spreads too far. Sooner or later, the only option is to amputate.