By LINDSEY GREEN

“You’re a f***ing ugly attention seeking whore.”

This is a tweet Hayley Mowat received.

Hayley is a PhD candidate at Monash University and an organiser of Slut Walk, an annual event aimed at ending victim blaming and slut shaming surrounding sexual assault. The 2015 Melbourne Slut Walk was held on September 15.

Hayley didn’t know the person who sent this tweet. She reported it but, according to Twitter, it wasn’t considered abuse.

This raises the question – when it comes to social media, what actually is considered abuse? And if Hayley’s tweet wasn’t considered abuse by Twitter, what is?

According to Twitter’s abusive behavior policy: “You may not engage in targeted abuse or harassment. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be targeted abuse or harassment are:

• if you are sending messages to a user from multiple accounts;
• if the sole purpose of your account is to send abusive messages to others;
• if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats”.

According to these guidelines, “when a Tweet or account is reported, we may investigate the full account reported, including profile, media and other Tweets”.

“We may investigate.”

Hayley’s case went one step further, and well beyond anonymous online threats.

“It sort of escalated to the point where I got posted a handwritten letter to my office at uni which called me a filthy piece of scum and to me, that was the unsettling part when it crossed from online,” she says.

Following this Hayley changed her names on Facebook and Twitter and removed the location of her office from where it had appeared online.

What happened to Hayley is not uncommon.

Jessamy Gleeson is also an organiser of Slut Walk and a PhD candidate at Swinburne University.

“The first [abusive message] I got which was also the most vivid one and the one I can always remember was a threat to cut out my uterus,” she says.

Jessamy says she often won’t bother reporting tweets like this because she knows it won’t achieve anything.

“When I got the uterus one I think I screencapped it and retweeted it and then blocked them. I don’t think I even bothered reporting it, like I couldn’t be f***ed honestly and this is something that I’ve had conversations with other feminists about, like what [Twitter] could and should be doing is so much more than what they’re actually doing,” she says.

Twitter has acknowledged the poor handling of abuse on their platform. A leaked memo from the chief executive, Dick Costolo, revealed him saying Twitter “sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years”.

This attitude is one that is reflected in the attitudes of some of the women who report abuse online.

Jennifer Beckett was a moderator for social media at the ABC for 3½ years.

“As a moderator the horrible thing is you see all of those awful things because you have to see them, it’s your job to see them and to remove them and to deal with them and then if something slips through the cracks, you’re abused for not dealing with it sooner,” she says.

In a Conversation article written last year, Jennifer suggested more research needed to be done into the psychological effects of this work on moderators.

“It does take an emotional toll, like you can’t go to work every day and basically sop up the worst of humanity without it having an effect on you,” she says.

Jennifer compared how a rape threat was handled as a moderator, compared to a bomb threat.

“If somebody was to tweet a bomb threat at the ABC, the whole building would shut down. Somebody tweets a rape threat and it’s like, ‘well we better have a pattern to prove that they might mean it’,” she says.

Like Jessamy and Hayley, Jennifer had little resolution when reporting abuse. Jennifer says she would report users, only to have them reappear with a different account.

“Sometimes you can tell who it is from the style. You pick up, ‘oh that’s that person who always spells that incorrectly, they’re back again,” she says. She would block them again.

The only way to really block a user would be to block their whole ISP address, but this would raise other issues.

“If you block an ISP… you’ve effectively blocked everybody’s internet, you block anyone who has an account on that ISP,” Jennifer says.

Users have been able to report tweets for two years now. But simply having the ability to report tweets doesn’t necessarily mean they will be dealt with effectively.

Jessamy says the ineffective nature of reporting abuse has stopped her from reporting in the past.

“I don’t know exactly what the reporting guidelines are but I know that I’ve rarely reported tweets because it’s never resulted in anything. Like I’ve never had a positive outcome,” she says.

According to Twitter: “Twitter provides a global communication platform which encompasses a variety of users with different voices, ideas and perspectives. Because of this diversity, you may encounter content you consider to be inflammatory or inappropriate that is not considered a violation of our rules.”

But what counts as diversity of opinion, and what counts as abuse continues to remain unclear.

@LindsJGreen