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First Click: Periscope's subhuman trolls

April 9th, 2015

10

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?

Five stories to start your day


  1. Periscope's new follower-only mode keeps strangers from trolling you

    Twitter's original plan for that was the threat of having the service linked up with your Twitter account. Today it's gone one step beyond with a new "follower only" mode. As the name suggests, only people you follow will be able to comment.

  2. Hillary Clinton poaches Google exec to oversee technology for presidential bid

    The Washington Post reports that Stephanie Hannon, who works as Google's director of product management for civic innovation and social impact, will become the campaign's chief technology officer, working with a team of developers and engineers to design ways for Clinton to reach voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

  3. The Meld smart knob takes over your stove to do the cooking

    The product itself is actually made up of three components: the knob, which mechanically controls the temperature on the burner with a battery-powered motor; a thermometer, which clips into your pots and pans to measure the temperature, sending data back wirelessly to the knob; and a connected iOS and Android app, which allows you to remotely control the temperature or choose from hundreds of preset recipes.

  4. Apple photographed a flower over 24,000 times for a single Watch face

    The flowers were photographed in stop-motion, which can be a painstaking process — Dye says one flower required more than 24,000 shots over 285 hours.

  5. Daniel Radcliffe could play Grand Theft Auto developer in BBC special

    Radcliffe is set to play Sam Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games, dramatizing his clashes with anti-gaming activist and now-disbarred attorney Jack Thompson over what Thompson argued were unacceptable levels of violence in video games.

Soup of the day

Game of Thrones Opening Reimagined As An Old Man Eating Soup

Posted by ClickHole on Wednesday, April 8, 2015