Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to create an algorithm to filter out abusive and hateful language during a company-sponsored Q&A with President Obama in 2015 according to a Buzzfeed report.
Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (Image: AP Photo / Michel Euler)
The story cites one former senior Twitter employee who alleges Costolo ordered a team of employees to build a new algorithm, feed it thousands of examples of abusive and harassing tweets, then deploy it to filter out abusive language sent to the President during his Q&A at Twitter.
A different source said that individuals from Twitter’s media partnerships team also manually censored tweets because the algorithm was inconsistent and couldn’t be solely relied on.
Costolo’s decision to create the algorithm was reportedly “kept from senior company employees” for fear that they would object the decision. Until this decision was made, Twitter had taken a hard stance on the freedom of speech. The company even published a blog post titled “The Tweets Must Flow” in 2011 reiterating its position.
“We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet,” co-founder Biz Stone said in the blog post, “but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”
So much has changed since then. Costolo and his successor Jack Dorsey have publicly admitted Twitter needs to do a better job of curbing abuse on the social network. “No one deserves to be the target of abuse on Twitter,” Dorsey said during a recent call with investors. “We need to do better.”
This year, Twitter has been outright aggressive about curtailing abuse on the network. The company permanently banned conservative media celebrity Milo Yiannopolous earlier this year for allegedly coordinating a sexist and racist Twitter attack against Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
We reached out to Twitter for comment but had not received a response by time of writing. However, Costolo has commented on Twitter:
1/ Total nonsense and laughably false as anybody who would speak on the record would tell you. Absurd.
Not even going to link to it.
— dick costolo (@dickc) August 11, 2016
2/ shows a lack of understanding of the very basics of how trust and safety works at Twitter. Sensationalist nonsense.
— dick costolo (@dickc) August 11, 2016
Twitter also released a statement in response to the Buzzfeed report:
In response to today’s BuzzFeed story on safety, we were contacted just last night for comment and obviously had not seen any part of the story until we read it today. We feel there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair portrayals but rather than go back and forth with BuzzFeed, we are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place. There is a lot of work to do but please know we are committed, focused, and will have updates to share soon.
[Buzzfeed]