Twitter, and social media in general, can be an extremely unfriendly environment. It can get so negative that some celebrities feel the need to step away for their own sanity. Lena Dunham deleted the app from her phone, and now only tweets via proxy, and Iggy Azalea just quit it entirely. Ashley Judd is taking her response a bit further, she plans to press charges on the people who bully her on Twitter.
“The amount of gender violence I experience is absolutely extraordinary, and a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that’s directed at me on social media,” Ashley told The Today Show. “Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write, and not allow this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist. And by the way, I’m pressing charges.”
That sounds like a lot of work, but Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo has admitted that Twitter doesn’t really have a good enough system to deal with abuse. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” he said. “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it.”
