Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Secretly Censored Abusive Responses To President Obama

[MikeWB]

In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a Q&A session, sources tell BuzzFeed News.

According to these sources, the May 2015 #AskPOTUS town hall came out of Twitter senior leadership's frustration with the fact that platforms like Reddit had become home to celebrity Q&As.

According to a former senior Twitter employee, Costolo ordered employees to deploy an algorithm (which was built in-house by feeding it thousands of examples of abuse and harassing tweets) that would filter out abusive language directed at Obama. Another source said the media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, noting that Twitter's public quality-filtering algorithms were inconsistent. Two sources told BuzzFeed News that this decision was kept from senior company employees for fear they would object to the decision.
According to sources, the decision upset some senior employees inside the company who strictly followed Twitter's long-standing commitment to unfettered free speech.

In its early years, Twitter took numerous public stands against censorship, even fighting a secret government order to provide user information for WikiLeaks. In 2011, Twitter senior executives published a blog post titled "The Tweets Must Flow."

"There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam," the post read. "However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule — we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content." Not long after the post, Twitter executives began publicly touting that "Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party."
A different source alleges that Twitter did the same thing during a Q&A with Caitlyn Jenner.

"This was another example of trying to woo celebs and show that you can have civilized conversations without the hate even if you're a high-profile person," the source said. "But it's another example of a double standard — we'll protect our celebrities, while the average user is out there subject to all kinds of horrible things."

A month after the Obama Q&A, Costolo stepped down as CEO, retaining a seat on Twitter's board. In an exit interview with The Guardian on his last day, he defended Twitter's commitment to free speech. "I will say directly that I think regulation is a threat to free speech," he said.

Costolo did not respond to requests for comment.

[rmstock]

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Sources: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Secretly Censored Abusive Responses To President Obama
The move was conducted in secret, according to well-placed sources.
posted on Aug. 11, 2016, at 2:41 p.m.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/sources-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-secretly-censored-abusive-r?utm_term=.ygmqkaZNb5#.syoR7VZX9P

Charlie Warzel
BuzzFeed News Reporter

  "[ ... ]
   Costolo did not respond to requests for comment.

   Read more about Twitter's 10-year failure to curb abuse here.

   Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Warzel
   reports on and writes about the intersection of tech and culture.
   Contact Charlie Warzel at charlie.warzel@buzzfeed.com. "




Twitter's ex-CEO is furious about an article that claims he secretly censored abusive tweets aimed at Obama
Rob Price   2h    36
http://uk.businessinsider.com/twitter-ex-ceo-dick-costolo-buzzfeed-report-abuse-problem-laughably-false-2016-8

  "The former CEO of Twitter has reacted angrily to a blistering report
   attacking the social network's failure to deal with trolling and
   harassment.
   
   BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel has published a deeply reported feature
   claiming that Twitter has "virtually been optimized to accommodate"
   hate speech and abuse — and that Costolo  censored abusive messages
   directed at Barack Obama during a question-and-answer session on the
   site.
   
   
   Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Andrew Burton/Getty Images
   
   "Total nonsense and laughably false as anybody who would speak on the
   record would tell you. Absurd," Costolo posted on Twitter on Thursday.
   
   "Shows a lack of understanding of the very basics of how trust and
   safety works at Twitter. Sensationalist nonsense."
   
   It's not immediately clear whether Costolo is denying claims that he
   censored tweets, or objecting to the critical thesis of the report more
   generally. The former executive did not immediately respond to Business
   Insider's request for clarification on Twitter, and did not respond to
   BuzzFeed's requests for comment as the report was being written.
   
   Twitter has long been regarded as having a serious problem with
   harassment and abuse — an issue that was thrown into sharp relief in
   recent months after "Ghostbusters" actress Leslie Jones was subjected
   to a torrent of racist and sexist abuse that culminated in  the banning
   of a conservative journalist, Milo Yiannopoulous, from the site.
   (Disclosure: I previously worked for Yiannopoulous' tech site The
   Kernel in 2013.)
   
   Costolo himself has admitted it. In a leaked memo from February 2015,
   the then-CEO said that "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the
   platform and we've sucked at it for years." And it's a problem that
   hasn't gone away:  During Twitter's July 2016 earnings call, current
   CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey told analysts: "We haven't been good
   enough at [dealing with abuse], and we must do better."
   
   But the BuzzFeed report, based off of interviews with "10 high-level
   former employees," sheds new light on the inner workings of the company
   as it grappled with the issue of abuse.
   
   For example,  former engineering manager Leslie Miley claimed that the
   company did not follow up on potential solutions if they damaged the
   site's growth. "I did see a lot of decisions being made in terms of
   growth when it came to how to handle abuse, which I get," she said.
   "But on the other side, if there's a trash fire burning in your front
   yard, saying you don't want to call the fire department because you
   don't want to get the house wet is not really a sensical thing."
   
   Dick Costolo was more supportive of attempts to moderate and "censor"
   abusive content than some others at the company, the report alleges. 
   Supposedly, he "secretly" had a team use an algorithmic tool that would
   censor abusive messages directed at President Obama during a
   question-and-answer session, with a media team also allegedly manually
   censoring tweets.
   
   https://twitter.com/dickc/status/763756555191717888
   https://twitter.com/dickc/status/763757166901596161
   
   SEE ALSO: Twitter admits — again — that it has failed to deal with its
   abuse problem » "