Tag: Twitter

That Time the Cleveland Browns Marketing Department Wanted Employees to See How Fans Were Interacting With the Team on Social Media

ESPN’s Seth Wickersham has an excellent look at the inside workings of the worst team in football and, apparently, one of the most poorly run organizations in sports–the Cleveland Browns.

The version of the Browns that emerges from Wickersham’s profile is the mother of all train wrecks, and this is typical of the sort of “can’t quite get anything right” nature of the organization.

Marketing executives wanted employees to see how fans were engaging with the Browns on social media, so they projected the Browns feed onto a giant wall at the facility. It was like broadcasting talk radio over the entire building, and one day in particular, it was worse than that. One of the marketing staffers entered a search for #dp — for Dawg Pound. The problem was, that hashtag carried a few different meanings, one of which triggered an array of porn to be broadcast onto a wall for the entire office to see for more than 20 minutes, until a tech employee killed the feed.

Medieval Death Bot

Medieval Death Bot is a Twitter bot with an accompanying Tumblr blog that simply tweets out summaries of deaths from medieval records.

Twitter Tells Users Being Harassed to File DMCA Takedowns

Crazy story at Medium by a woman who was being harassed by anti-vaxxers. The harassers got hold of a photo of the woman’s baby that she had posted online, and began tweeting out copies of the photo.

When she contacted Twitter, they suggested that she file a DMCA takedown notice for the images. For fuck’s sake. That is such bad advice on so many levels, not the least being that DMCA notices are generally going to result in the contact information of the individual or organization filing it to be shared with the person being served the notice.

And that’s what happened. She filed the DMCA notice which led to the image disappearing almost instantly from Twitter, but now the people harassing her were handed her personal contact information.

This is not the first time Twitter has suggested to users that they send DMCA notices to deal with harassing content without providing notice of what doing so entails.

There are so many things that Twitter could do to curtail abuse on its platform, and many of its heavy users have laid out in detail what they’d like to see change. Most of the suggestions by John Scalzi’s What I Want Out of Twitter would significantly dial back the level of abuse that individuals are exposed to:

1. Timed mutes.

2. Mutable phrases/hashtags in the web/mobile Twitter UI.

3. Make mute/block lists native to Twitter and shareable across clients.

4. Make mute/block lists easily shareable through Twitter between followers.

5. Robust filtering. [by account creation date/# of followers/account icon]

6. Muting in Notifications and Direct Messages.

7. The ability to see only replies/notifications from those you follow/whitelist.

8. An optional tab where muted/blocked account replies can go.

Unfortunately, Twitter seems completely uninterested in implementing these sort of suggestions. It seems to see Twitter as solely a link sharing/news service (hence the execrable Moments “feature”) rather than a discussion platform, and doesn’t seem to care about improving its system for those of us who use it for the latter purpose.