'We should open our eyes to how the world is, not how we want it to be,' Twitter exec tells MPs in Ottawa

To combat abuse on its platform, Twitter is developing tools and partnering with civil society and governments. But it’s also admitting it can’t help but reflect reality, warts and all.

“When you look at content on Twitter, it’s always a reflection of what’s happening in the offline world,” Patricia Cartes, Twitter’s head of global safety, said in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

“We want to foster in the platform what we call counter-speech, those counter-narratives where you have people coming into the platform to fight a specific prejudice.”

Cartes spoke with Yahoo ahead of her appearance in Ottawa at the Commons status of women committee, which has been tackling the topic of violence against young women and girls, particularly the nature of cyber-violence. Cartes told the committee that she has been a victim of online harassment herself.

Her comments to the committee come on the heels of prolific Twitter user Donald Trump’s shocking upset victory in the United States presidential election. President-elect Trump used Twitter almost daily during the campaign to issue a never-ending screed of taunts, disdain and condemnation at opponents everywhere he looked, including retweeting anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi posts.

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There have also been several incidents of anti-Muslim attacks. Twitter has been criticized for allowing hate speech to proliferate, with users bailing after being harassed with rape and death threats, and for incidents of doxxing, where personal information, or documents, are posted online with the intent of inciting pranks or hateful incidents.

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In her opening statements at Tuesday’s committee meeting, Cartes said Twitter has been working with MediaSmarts, a Canadian non-profit advocacy group working for digital and media literacy, and Canadian chapters of Hollaback, a group that uses crowdsourcing to counter harassment, as well as government officials.

Twitter also rolled out new tools last week, allowing users to report abusive tweets and to mute more content they find offensive.

In comments to Yahoo and to the committee, she highlighted the importance of what the company considers to be “counter-narratives,” such as #IllRideWithYou, where people showed solidarity with Muslims facing harassment by offering to accompany them on public transport, or #ILookLikeAnEngineer, where users attempted to counter sexist responses to an ad promoting female engineers.

But Cartes also argued in response to committee questioning that policing content is a balancing act between ferreting out harassment and putting a damper on free speech.

She told Liberal MP Karen Ludwig (New Brunswick Southwest), who asked about the impact of celebrities on the effectiveness of fighting cyber-bullying, that she appreciates how celebrities and others raise awareness of the issue, but that fundamentally, online abuse doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

“What is quite interesting when it comes to the incitement of hate on Twitter, is that while of course we will do anything in our power to fight it in our platform, we just have to remember that these ideas are floating around in society, and we should open our eyes to how the world is, not how we want it to be,” she told Ludwig.

The company’s terms of use ban threats or encouragement of terrorism or violence, but figuring out if content should be classified as abuse isn’t easy, Cartes noted in her remarks.

“We have to think about patterns of behaviour: Are we seeing users who are previously suspended coming back with similar email addresses, similar names, using similar hashtags, and targeting the same accounts?” she said. “When we see a combination of those patterns, it’s easier for us to automate [detection]. We cannot simply block a word, or block an IP address and hope that the abuse will go away.”

As well, “the way we enforce our rules depends on the severity of the violation of the rule,” she noted. If an account was made specifically for the purpose of harassing someone, for example, it can be permanently banned. But if a user has tweeted “constructively” at other times, it gets trickier.

Twitter has 313 million users, a far cry from Facebook’s 1.79 billion monthly active users. But its scale can be better seen in the number of tweets, which total 500 million a day. It took three years to get to a billion tweets, said Cartes, but now the company processes the same amount in two days.

Algorithms built to spotlight abuse also produce false positives. Cartes gave two examples in response to committee questioning: one was the use of the hashtag #StopIslam, which got reclaimed by those sympathetic to targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Another example, she said, was the use of “bitch” — seemingly a pejorative, but actually used by many people as a way of saying hello.

Twitter is also careful to promote itself as a platform for whistleblowers and others who wish to remain anonymous. The platform frowns on fake accounts, but constricting its use only to people’s “real names,” as Facebook attempts to do, may actually have a negative impact on those wishing to speak truth to power, she said.

When Conservative MP Karen Vecchio (Elgin — Middlesex — London) asked about what techniques women should employ who are being harassed online but want to keep using Twitter, Cartes admitted to the committee that she had also been a victim of harassment once.

“I rarely share this publicly, but I was a victim of a high-profile harassment case in Ireland,” said Cartes, who previously worked for Facebook and Google.

“The first thing that the… Irish police said to me was, ‘Well you need to get off these platforms.’ Well, I work in them, so I can’t. I know how terrible that feels when that is the only word of advice you get, especially because you are made to feel like you were in the wrong.” Users should not be forced to change the way they’re interacting, she argued.

Twitter also must navigate the minefield of a global network of national laws. Tweets that technically don’t break the terms of use may still be illegal in some countries. She gave the committee two examples: Turkey’s crackdown of certain online content, as well as laws against Holocaust denial in countries like Germany.

The committee also heard from the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Native Women’s Association of Canada and Babely Shades, which describes itself as “a collective of artists and activists of colour and marginalized genders from the Ottawa area.”

Babely Shades member Awar Obob talked about hate incidents in the wake of Trump’s election. “We like to think we’re not really that attached to [U.S. politics], but it has a huge effect, and factor, on the proceedings that go on within the country,” said Obob.

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““The pain that the majority of the minorities are feeling in the country really needs to be addressed and heard and dealt with properly. Just dealt with, period,” continued Obob.

“There needs to be some type of vocal outrage that is not just from the lower working class people, who have most of this pain on their backs. It also needs to come from above, from the government, from high-standing officials, to show, ‘Hey, we do not approve of this, this is not a proper Canadian thing to do, this is not who we are as a people.’”