How to Deal With Harassment on Twitter

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We want that you want if you and your group of Hong Kong protesters are planning a protest, you don't want the polar bureau to be able to order your Twitter. So although if I receive a DM, maybe I should be able to keep a copy of it. What if you've been arrested by the Chinese state and you want and the person who sent you the message wants to delete the incriminating side of it? That would allow you to recover DMs for the purposes of dealing with this kind of harassment. And remember, Facebook has got 2.3 billion users. That means they've got 2300, one in a million use cases every day.

Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In multiple ways — as a blogger, activist, fiction writer, and more — Cory Doctorow has been thinking about how the internet is affecting our lives since the very beginning. He has been especially interested in legal issues surrounding copyright, publishing, and free speech, and recently his attention has turned to broader economic concerns. We talk about how the internet has become largely organized through just a small number of quasi-monopolistic portals, how this affects the ways in which we gather information and decide whether to trust outside sources, and where things might go from here.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is a co-editor of the website Boing Boing, and works as a special consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of the nonfiction book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free as well as science-fiction works such as Walkaway and Radicalized. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University, where he is also a Visiting Professor, as well as being an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science.