Twitter’s chief executive has acknowledged that the company “sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years”, in a leaked memo.
Dick Costolo’s statement was posted on Twitter’s internal forums, in response to an employee who had highlighted an article in the Guardian by the comedian Lindy West about her experience with trolls on social media.
In the memo, obtained on Thursday by The Verge , Costolo writes: “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. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.”
“It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day”, Costolo continues. “We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”
West had written on Monday: “I’m aware that Twitter is well within its rights to let its platform be used as a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment. But, as a private company – just like a comedian mulling over a rape joke, or a troll looking for a target for his anger – it could choose not to. As a collective of human beings, it could choose to be better.”
Costolo’s reply to the employee who had raised West’s article suggests it has prompted action: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital,” he wrote.
In a follow-up comment later in the thread, Costolo says: “Let me be very very clear about my response here. I takepersonal responsibility for our failure to deal with this as a company. I thought I did that in my note, so let me reiterate what I said, which is that I take personal responsibility for this. I specifically said: ‘It’s nobody’s fault but mine.’
“We have to be able to tell each other the truth, and the truth that everybody in the world knows is that we have not effectively dealt with this problem even remotely to the degree we should have by now, and that’s on me and nobody else.”
Costolo continued: “So now we’re going to fix it, and I’m going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.”
In June 2014, the Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Rebecca Adlington revealed that abuse on Twitter had harmed her self-confidence in the wake of the London Olympics. “I did get upset about it,” she told the Guardian. “I couldn’t get my head around why someone would go to the effort of looking someone up, and then sending them a nasty tweet. I still can’t really. What’s going on in those people’s lives?”
And in October, Chloe Madeley, daughter of TV presenters Richard and Judy, wastargeted for harassment by people upset about her mother’s comments about convicted rapist Ched Evans. Chloe condemned her trolls in the Daily Mail as someone who sends who send “lewd, disturbing messages” while he “cowered anonymously behind his computer screen”.
In December, Shreyas Doshi, Twitter’s director of product management, user safety, wrote: “We are nowhere near being done making changes in this area. In the coming months, you can expect to see additional user controls, further improvements to reporting and new enforcement procedures for abusive accounts. We’ll continue to work hard on these changes in order to improve the experience of people who encounter abuse on Twitter.
THE GUARDIAN