First Click

First Click: Periscope's subhuman trolls

April 9th, 2015

By Thomas Ricker
on April 9, 2015 07:30 am
@Trixxy

Periscope’s fun, unless you’re a woman.

“You look lovely”
“bitch ugly”
“Show us your tits”
“your face looks like vomit”

These are actual comments pulled from recent broadcasts whenever women, or even young girls, dared to put themselves in front of Periscope’s network of strangers. Go ahead, try for yourself: tune in to any global broadcast hosted by a Simone, Emma, or Andrea, for example, and you'll eventually see the same. At just two weeks old, Periscope's already mired in a frat culture throbbing with anonymous keyboard courage. Just like every other social network.

Fortunately, Twitter is moving fast to correct this — much faster than it ever responded to harassment on its eponymous social network. Periscope 1.0, released on March 26th, has already received substantial updates on April 2nd and then again last night, each giving more control to broadcasters in order to stem abuse.

Online harassment of women is hardly a new internet phenomena, raising the question of why these v1.02 safeguards weren’t built-in to the app at launch?

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