Twitter's ex-CEO is furious about an article that claims he secretly censored abusive tweets aimed at Obama
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.
"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.