Why reporting abusive tweets to the twit’s mother might not work.

Folks have been tweeting about a particular exchange on Twitter in which:

• One person tweeted something abusive at another Twitter user
• A third Twitter user offered to provide the target of the abuse with the mailing address of the first person’s mother, the better to print out and mail her the abusive tweet her darling son had sent
• The first person tweeted what he said was a sincere apology for the abuse in his earlier tweet

The conclusion some have drawn from this one exchange is that Twitter needs a “report this tweet to the tweeter’s mom” button, which will seriously cut down on Twitter abuse.

Now, I chuckled at the abusive twit’s speedy about-face, but it only takes a few moments’ reflection to recognize that this strategy for reducing online abuse has problems. Here are just a few from the very top of my head:

1. It’s not a sure thing that Mom will have any problem with the offspring flinging abuse at others. (Maybe Mom flings online abuse herself! Maybe that’s where Mom’s offspring learned how to fling abuse!)
2. It’s not a sure thing that the offspring flinging abuse actually cares whether Mom knows about it. There seem to be significant stretches of the lifespan during which Mom’s approval isn’t a goal worth putting any kind of effort toward.
3. Even if the offspring flinging abuse does care if Mom knows about it and disapproves, tasking Mom with communicating her approval — especially to offspring no longer living under Mom’s roof — is just giving her more work. When will Mom’s thankless work be over?
4. For some Twitter users one might try to shame, there’s a decent chance of misidentifying the corresponding Mom. Now you’re giving that misidentified Mom thankless work generated by some other Mom’s offspring, which is not cool at all.
5. Maybe Mom has shuffled off this mortal coil. How are you going to shame her surviving offspring into behaving online now?
6. Maybe the offspring flinging abuse is not using a real name online.
7. Maybe the mother of the offspring flinging abuse is not using a real name online. Are you going to compromise her anonymity (for which she may have very good reasons), including providing her actual mailing address to a stranger, simply to deal with her offspring’s online behavior? That’s not cool.
8. Where the hell is Dad is all of this? Why is Mom presumed to be the only parent capable of exerting a civilizing force on offspring?

So, nice try, but we’re going to have to think harder about how to share online spaces and how best to prevail on people not to be abusive jerks to each other. This is just a subset of the project of being a grown-up who is also a decent human being, and Mom would really like you to figure out how to do this without her constant intervention.

(Plus, would it kill you to sit up straighter while you’re online?)