Twitter has updated its privacy policy and community guidelines, making the platform’s stance against sharing private images and videos much more rigid.
Of course, one wonders why that wasn’t ever the case in the first place. You have an online platform that’s harboring literal millions upon millions of users, and setting up a rule against sharing private images was just dreamt up? I had no idea that such an elaborate addition to Twitter’s privacy policy only took a meager 15 years to implement. Quite a brilliant strategy, really, I’m sure that users across the platform, who were already feeling so very safe and secure (especially non-white individuals), will only feel more empowered and emboldened online. Since, after all, all that it takes to stop someone dead in their private photo stealing and sharing sprees is to firmly cross your hand and say “stop it”. Twitter’s got it all figured out, and everyone else can just sit back and relax.
If the sardonic undertones of my previous paragraph weren’t glaringly obvious, I apologize to my readers for speaking in sub-text. Allow me to rectify this error by explicitly stating that Twitter’s privacy policy update is nothing more than a meaningless grab at attention and social credit. By doing perhaps even less than the bare minimum, the social media platform wants to jump in on the good side of its community. Imagine taking 15 years to realize that a very scary and real problem exists on your platform. People have had personal pictures, videos, and other such information leaked to the public so many times over such platforms. This sort of mental damage can prove to be debilitating to an individual, especially since many afflicted individuals happen to be high school students surrounded by a clique of teenagers who haven’t developed empathy yet.
Twitter’s response to the problem happens to be very simplistic, to use a kinder adjective. A more accurate one would be lazy, or dumb, but let’s move on. The platform seems to be content in just announcing to users that DM’ing private photos of anyone is bad and should not be done. Twitter has made no pledge to integrate any measures that can limit, if not fully stop, such messages from going around. All it did was announce that privacy invasion is bad, and pat themselves on the back as the rest of the community shrugged their shoulders and went on back to work.
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Of course, one wonders why that wasn’t ever the case in the first place. You have an online platform that’s harboring literal millions upon millions of users, and setting up a rule against sharing private images was just dreamt up? I had no idea that such an elaborate addition to Twitter’s privacy policy only took a meager 15 years to implement. Quite a brilliant strategy, really, I’m sure that users across the platform, who were already feeling so very safe and secure (especially non-white individuals), will only feel more empowered and emboldened online. Since, after all, all that it takes to stop someone dead in their private photo stealing and sharing sprees is to firmly cross your hand and say “stop it”. Twitter’s got it all figured out, and everyone else can just sit back and relax.
If the sardonic undertones of my previous paragraph weren’t glaringly obvious, I apologize to my readers for speaking in sub-text. Allow me to rectify this error by explicitly stating that Twitter’s privacy policy update is nothing more than a meaningless grab at attention and social credit. By doing perhaps even less than the bare minimum, the social media platform wants to jump in on the good side of its community. Imagine taking 15 years to realize that a very scary and real problem exists on your platform. People have had personal pictures, videos, and other such information leaked to the public so many times over such platforms. This sort of mental damage can prove to be debilitating to an individual, especially since many afflicted individuals happen to be high school students surrounded by a clique of teenagers who haven’t developed empathy yet.
Twitter’s response to the problem happens to be very simplistic, to use a kinder adjective. A more accurate one would be lazy, or dumb, but let’s move on. The platform seems to be content in just announcing to users that DM’ing private photos of anyone is bad and should not be done. Twitter has made no pledge to integrate any measures that can limit, if not fully stop, such messages from going around. All it did was announce that privacy invasion is bad, and pat themselves on the back as the rest of the community shrugged their shoulders and went on back to work.
