Just a few days after announcing a round of changes intended to make trolling more difficult — including, crucially, an investment in staff and tech that promises to make the process of getting abusive accounts suspended faster and easier — this week, Twitter experienced what could easily be seen as the first major test of its new anti-trolling mechanisms.
It was a doozy at that: After posting a picture of his teenage daughter on Twitter following her college acceptance, the former Red Sox player (and current ESPN commentator) Curt Schilling began receiving a torrent of vile insults and threats, targeted at his child. And he fought back, posting a brutal 1,700-word blog post detailing the abuse and outing its perpetrators.
The hammer came down quickly and decisively: As of this afternoon, one was suspended from his college and was reportedly under police investigation; the other — a Yankees employee, in a strange twist — was fired from his job.
Simultaneously, punishment was meted out online. Because Twitter has tripled the size of its support staff and streamlined reporting processes, Schilling's troll (at least one — the other wisely shut down his account preemptively) was suspended significantly faster than he would have been just months ago
It was weirdly satisfying, watching someone vanquish trolls with the help of Twitter. And from the company's perspective, it certainly looked like its investment was paying off. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the details of the case to BuzzFeed News, but confirmed that the incident is an example of Twitter's new tools and processes working, and that there are still many changes to come.
The system worked. Except, not exactly.
Twitter seems to be genuinely serious about cracking down on abuse, and by all appearances, the speed with which Schilling's tormentors' accounts were suspended represents a high-profile proof of concept of the company's new systems. Yet this was a case where the victim was able to marshal lots of attention, and getting accounts suspended is only part of the battle when it comes to dealing with trolls, and the experience of many, many women on the internet has shown that law enforcement isn't always so cooperative or fast-moving.
Schiling's case was about as far from a standard case of Twitter abuse as you can get. Let's review: The victims were a famous athlete and his child. The too-good-to-be-true particulars of the story — namely Schilling's Red Sox affiliation and the fact that one of his tormentors worked for the Yankees — were catnip for the sports press. And unlike the army of egg avatars and sock puppets that attacked people like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian under the banner of GamerGate, Schilling's and his daughter's attackers appear to have been both few in number and not very savvy about hiding their identities: In his blog post, Schilling easily identified the two ringleaders by name and profession.
In other words, save for maybe the nature of the bile itself — virulent trolls appear to be nothing if not deeply uncreative — Schilling's story is the exception, not the rule.
For every Curt Schilling out there, there are thousands and thousands of people without the cultural capital to get a quick response from the cops, or whose tormentors don't make it quite so easy. Twitter can devote all the resources it wants to ending abuse, but it's only one actor in a bigger legal and social system — one that's much less nimble and, in many cases, much less equitable.