Twitter has said that it is “evaluating its policies” after Zelda Williams, the daughter of late actor and comedian Robin Williams, was forced to quite the social networking site following a torrent of vile abuse.
After a selection of Twitter users sent her a stream of hateful messages regarding the tragic death of her father, Zelda tweeted the following message to her followers: “I’m sorry. I should’ve risen above. Deleting this from my devices for a good long time, maybe forever. Time will tell. Goodbye.”
Related: Robin Williams’ Daughter Zelda Writes Loving Tribute on Tumblr
The actress also issued a lengthier statement on Instagram, writing: “I will be leaving this account for a but while I heal and decide if I’ll be deleting it or not. In this difficult time, please try to be respectful of the accounts of myself, my family and my friends. Mining our accounts for photos of dad, or judging me on the number of them is cruel and unnecessary.
“There are a couple throughout, but the real private moments I shared with him were precious, quiet, and believe it or not, not full of photos or ‘selfies’. I shared him with a world where everyone was taking their photo with him, but I was lucky enough to spend time with him without cameras too.
“That was more than enough, and I’m grateful for what little time I had. My favorite photos of family are framed in my house, not posted on social media, and they ‘ll remain there. They would’ve wound up on the news or blogs then, and they certainly would now. That’s not what I want for our memories together.
“Thank you for your respect and understanding in this difficult time. Goodbye. Xo”
Twitter has now suspended a number of accounts that Zelda had personally requested to be removed the site, tweeting: “Please report @PimpStory @MrGoosebuster. I’m shaking. I can’t. Please. Twitter requires a link and I won’t open it. Don’t either. Please.” This tweet was later deleted.
Del Harvey, VP of Trust and Safety at Twitter, emailed Mashable in regards to the online bullying of Zelda, writing: “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter.
“We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users.”
Typically this sort of behavior leads to a select few branding this as “censorship” on behalf of Twitter, but it should be noted that a company allowing these kinds of harmful, disgusting messages to be distributed via its network is, in a way, advocating them. While it’s unreasonable to think that Twitter would be able to block every user who tweets obscene, offensive and upsetting messages (there are far too many awful people in this world for this to be possible), in this instance where the accounts behind these hateful messages has been made clear, it is absolutely the right call for Twitter to ban them from their site.
Hopefully this will lead to Twitter becoming a safer place in the future for victims of online bullying.
Photo: Getty Images
