Ghostbusters (Village Roadshow Pictures, 2016)
Since the new Ghostbusters' trailer was released, the remake has experienced a great deal of criticism for its “all-female” cast. However Ghostbusters’ star, Leslie Jones, has not only experienced disapproval from the typical Internet "fanboys" but has also been attacked by abusive Twitter users. For the past month or so, Jones has been harassed by a group of accounts that have been sending her racist messages fueled with hatred as well as offensive images of pornography. In response, Paul Feig, director of Ghostbusters (2016), along with celebrities William Shatner and Margaret Cho have been using the hashtag #LoveforLeslieJ to express their support for the actress. Despite efforts to rally positive solidarity around Jones, the star recently announced that she would be leaving Twitter.
For some time now, Twitter has been scrutinized for its lack of “control” over users posting hateful content. With regards to Jones’ recent departure from the Twitter platform, the social media company issued a response saying, “we rely on people to report this type of behavior to us, but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse.”
Back in May, Facebook announced they would be investing in and researching the potential use of artificial intelligence systems to help censor the uploading of pornographic or hateful images before they reach the user interface—thereby inhibiting people from being exposed to this content from the start. Using AI, Facebook would be deploying a more proactive approach to blocking abusive users from expressing hurtful content on their social network. It's quite clear and now especially relevant with the recent attack on Jones that Twitter needs to only develop stricter guidelines to their platform but also utilize a more sophisticated technology that can help ameliorate the moral quality of the social network and prohibit obscenity and words of hate before further abuse destroys the platform's normative boundaries of safety and comfortability.
In the past, Twitter has repeatedly tackled issues of censorship with regards to freedom of speech but now's the time for CEO, Jack Dorsey, to step up and save the platform from eroding into a medium undermined by cyber bullies and/or "creepy" accounts created specifically with the intention of spamming users with obscene sexual content.