“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment
By March 2008, exhausted and disillusioned by a torrent of tweets calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and publicizing personal information like her email address, Waldman reached out to Twitter again, this time to the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. After a series of phone calls to the company went nowhere, Dorsey and Twitter went silent. So in May, Waldman went public, detailing her ordeal in a blog post, which caught fire in media circles.
.. depicting Dorsey in particular as an unsympathetic, even cowardly, chief executive. “Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it,” Waldman wrote. While Twitter founder Biz Stone issued a formal acknowledgment of the problem, arguing that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content,” Dorsey was silent.
.. harassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.”
.. But rather than censor the unsavory blogs, Williams and company saw an opportunity to build a platform committed to free expression and the democratic spirit of the internet. That decision was fought internally, pitting Goldman against Sheryl Sandberg, at the time head of Google AdWords, in what Goldman called “a straight-up turf war.”
.. “We don’t get involved in adjudicating whether something is libel or slander,” Goldman told Forbes in 2005.
.. : “In squabbles between anonymous bloggers and victims Google sides with the attackers, refusing to turn over any information unless a judge orders it to open up. ‘We’ll do it if we believe we are required to by law,’ [Goldman] says.”