Read on Twitter
About an hour ago, a huge amount of the British sporting community started a social media boycott, in protest against the unacceptable abuse they receive on a regular basis on those platforms - namely @Facebook, @Instagram and @Twitter
The sheer scale of these protests and the support they have gathered from players, teams, media organisations and others is a step in the right direction in holding the social media companies to better account
But the problem is that the social media companies response will always be along these lines - putting the onus on those receiving abuse to filter it out, rather than having the courage to prevent it from happening at source
This is because their business models rely on the number of daily/weekly/monthly "active users" continuing to grow, so they can take those figures to the biggest brands in the world, and persuade them to spend billions of pounds on social advertising
In order to affect real change, we must impact those numbers. @adidas have stopped advertising on Facebook this weekend, but one brand, for one weekend, is not even the tiniest drop in the ocean
I believe, that in order to force the platforms to take real action, we must create an alternative space, where abuse and other issues are taken seriously
If people, especially high profile people, move PERMANENTLY to a different platform, Facebook/Twitter/etc. will be forced to take notice and take real action, instead of offering yet more empty promises and tools the leave the onus on the recipients of abuse to take action
With the engineering scale and talent that these companies have, it is easy to block a lot more of the abuse than they do
Take this message sent to @IanWright0 - a high school student could have written a piece of code to automatically recognise that as hate and racist abuse and block it at source. The truth is, they don't deal with these messages because they don't want to https://twitter.com/premierleague/status/1388070624925556736
While I don't agree with all the @premierleague's suggestions (in particular those around formal ID, given the data protection and discrimination potential), I believe there are ways in which we create a better version of social media. That's why I've built my own prototype
http://shaerd.com is based on the concept of shared accountability, and prevents "burner" accounts from being created and instantly used for abuse. This may not be the answer, and I welcome any and all feedback/different ideas, but let's do something more than one weekend
