Social media trolls and why Periscope is bad news for women everywhere

Twitter owns it. That's bad news for women everywhere.

And Periscope's cofounder has the usual response when asked what the start-up will do about trolling. Let's paraphrase that. We will let users sort their own problems out.

I use new stuff ASAP. Periscope, the livestreaming app Twitter bought in February, is my cup of poor pixellation. Right here, right now, you can come with me to the markets, to the beach, to editorial meetings, to my birthday dinner.

But when I started using it a couple of weeks back, the trolling started pretty much straight away.

There was I showing the universe Bondi at its most cheesy. Beach. Waves. Sand. Toddlers.

And soon, there was another stream of all the words you don't ever want to see on your beach excursion. Or ever.

The usual "sluts" and "whores". Moving on to body parts of all kinds.

I'm a seasoned experiencer of trolling. Morning. Noon. Night. I'm a slut, a whore and often a lesbian. This day on the beach though, I was just another c---.

Same person. Same word. Over and over again. As soon as I stopped streaming, I blocked the user.

It was a little fiddly back then. You had to go to the user's profile and then choose from a list of stuff before you could get rid of the little shit. Now, it's a tiny bit more streamlined. But keep in mind, you are doing this at the same time as you are trying to show people exactly how to make trouble. Or pastry. Or show what the surf looks like at any given time.

Kayvon Beykpour, Periscope's 26 year old cofounder, says he gets it's difficult to multitask. He says that the Periscope team has already done two updates in two weeks partly to address the problem of trolling.

But it's more or less the Twitter response – which is that the responsibility lies with the user. Learn to block, mute, report, depending on the variety of trolling. And that's about it.

Compare that with Facebook which has a network for serious troll problems. Users let Facebook know there's a problem; and then it responds by providing tools to deal. When there is a serious emergency, Facebook delivers. That has not been my experience of Twitter. Ever.

And don't come all blue tick at me. Come the ugliest trolls, blue ticks are absolutely no defence. Blue ticks are to protect your reputation, not your mental health.

A few months back, Twitter announced it would roll out ways for women to protect themselves but hasn't reached my account yet.

Facebook, on the other hand, might be gigantic but it's on its way to doing a good job of protecting women who've been abused. And when I talk to women activists, that's certainly been their experience too.

Beykpour says he doesn't think it's useful to have word blocking because sometimes mates muck around and use those words playfully.

"It's difficult to understand the context automatically," he says.

Maybe I could choose to block words?

"That's a possibility," he says noncommittally.

And: "We want to make sure all of the tools [to get rid of trolls] are available to users."

Then I ask him about his company – because what else can you talk about when the man in charge thinks it's possible to improve his app by giving me a block button.

Turns out that when I ask him about the women in his company, there are two. The Android engineer Sara Haider.

And the office manager.