According to a purported, internal Twitter memo obtained by The Verge, Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo is taking personal responsibility for their poor record of dealing with abusive behavior on their platform – behavior that makes Twitter, as well as other online spaces, unwelcoming to non-white, non-cis-male individuals. Costolo wants this reputation to change and will, apparently, be putting serious resources behind this effort. Twitter is finally recognizing the need to combat online abuse and trolls, not that this is the right thing to do, but because it is costing them valuable users.
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd.
–Nitasha Tiku & Casey Newton quoting Twitter CEO Dick Costolo from what is, reportedly, a Twitter internal memo
For those of us interested in having online spaces be venues for debate, discussion, and promotion of equality, the prospect of robust tools built into the platform and taken seriously by Twitter is potentially a huge step forward.
HT: Alex Medina
The Finch and Pea 