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Leaked CEO Memo Confirms Twitter ‘Suck’ at Controlling Trolls

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A harshly worded memo from Twitter’s CEO confirms that the company has lost complete control over the abuse shared over the micro-blogging network.

Not intended for public eyes but obtained and shared by The Verge, the internal note from Dick Costolo (@dickc) has the CEO blaming himself for the loss of users due to the massive amount of online trolling that takes place unmoderated over Twitter on a daily basis. Twitter has a help section dedicated to how and when to report abuse which ranges from disagreement of opinions, cyberbullying over sexuality, appearance and race (as just a handful of subjects) up to threats of physical violence – but reporting these instances will rarely see the perpetrators removed from Twitter.

Costolo has been with Twitter since leaving Google in 2009, becoming CEO in 2010 and tells his company that he’s “ashamed” of how things have been let to spoil since his time in charge of the social network. His position has seen Twitter grow to over 284-million active users (December 2014) who regularly share their daily (and in some cases minutely) updates. Most Tweets posted are harmless but some members will unfortunately go beyond reasonable jest to use their 140-character limit for malicious reasons, purposefully causing offense and upset.

The memo in full reads:

“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. 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.

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.”

Now that the note has leaked and an admission of guilt by the head of Twitter has been seen by the online masses we’d hope that the promises of a more forcible approach against offenders will actually happen, and happen soon.

For assistance and current policy on abuse on Twitter visit the Help Center.

Source: The Verge