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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Secretly Censored Abusive Responses To President Obama, Says Report (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed: In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a question and answer session, sources tell BuzzFeed News. 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. A different source alleges that Twitter did the same thing during a question and answer with Caitlyn Jenner.

6 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Twitter doesn't filter, they said so by bongey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Q: Do you filter out certain Tweets before they appear on Twitter? A: No
    Our users now send a billion Tweets every four days—filtering is neither desirable nor realistic. With this new feature, we are going to be reactive only: that is, we will withhold specific content only when required to do so in response to what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request.https://blog.twitter.com/2012/tweets-still-must-flow

  2. Re:First Post... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    The following post has been deleted for calling President Obama a 'nigger faggot.'

    An investigation on the matter is underway.

  3. Re:Who Cares? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 3, Informative

    I doubt anyone of you would survive the abuse Obama got over the two terms he's been in office.

    --
    Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  4. Re:Trolls are a danger to a free society by sexconker · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you abuse a right, you risk having it taken away from you

    No, you don't. Rights aren't privileges. The right to free speech is inalienable.

  5. Re: Does this surprise anyone??? by Alypius · · Score: 1, Informative

    Even then, there is no surgery or therapy that can change one's base XX or XY designation.

  6. Re:The word by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That tired old "it's only censorship when the government does it" nonsense is getting annoying. Private corporations can and do censor, too.