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

Posted by BeauHD on from the free-speech dept.

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.

11 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. First Post... by bongey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The following account has been suspended for violating our terms of service of not agreeing with us politically.

  2. Who Cares? by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As an avid anti-Obama person I can't say that I really care. As much as I think he's been a poor excuse for a president, almost as bad as his predecessor, he's still the President of the United States. I think the office deserves respect even if the person holding it doesn't. If people can't express their displeasure without nasty, obscene and abusive language then I feel Twitter should censor them. If they want to practice their first amendment rights it is not incumbent upon Twitter to allow them a platform for it.

    1. Re:Who Cares? by jcr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the office deserves respect

      Fuck that. The office deserves intense scrutiny.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    2. Re:Who Cares? by rworne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This was for a twitter Q&A session?

      I also am no big fan of the POTUS, but if Twitter was filtering out trolls and other related crap to cut down on the noise, then so be it. I consider it more like moderation rather than censorship.

      As long as the filtering was only for "abusive and hateful" messages, I have no problem with it at all. If they were cutting out legitimate but potentially embarrassing questions based on a political agenda, then I do have a problem.

      The best way to handle this is to up-front disclose that submissions to the Q&A will be moderated and abusive/hateful messages will be deleted.

      --
      I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
    3. Re:Who Cares? by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You can't scrutinize something without being respectful? Or at least civil?

    4. Re:Who Cares? by Aighearach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, very not news. IMO if you're doing a sponsored Q&A with a VIP and you don't moderate it, you're just trolling for trolls. And what VIP is going to say yes to you? Of course you better moderate.

      I'm not a VIP, and I wouldn't agree to something like that as a published event if they didn't even have ushers. Even a waiter in a restaurant is going to kick people out if they're hurtling abuse at other diners.

      Like at a baseball game; you can shout whatever you want at the umpire. If you're sitting near the front in an identifiable spot and you shout clearly offensive stuff at the VIPs during intermission events, you might very well get kicked out of the stadium. This is to be expected.

      And no, when you're providing a service you don't really need to warn people that if they're abusive or hateful to other participants, they might get kicked out. That is really basic and obvious.

  3. Liberal echo chamber by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This way they can always point to the comments and say look how many people agree. It's part of a no-negativity culture. Helps hide the truth. Imagine finding out that your post with 1000 likes actually was hated by 100,000 people?

    They don't do this for donald trump or any other figures who don't fit he agenda.

  4. 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

  5. Is this really that problematic? by flopsquad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I fail to see how silencing the GNAA trolls during a Q&A session is cause for great hand wringing. It didn't say they filtered "conservative viewpoints" or "reasoned criticisms"... they said "abusive responses." And it's Twitter's 1st amendment right to allow abuse (within the confines of the law) or not on their platform.

    --
    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
  6. The Ministry of Truth in action. by sethstorm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They don't protect from abuse or harassment, they just protect the leftist narrative. Anything that challenges it, no matter how trivial, is deemed "abuse" or "harassment" for emotional appeal.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  7. Re:The Eternal Struggle by bongey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem is Twitter is selectively defining what is hate speech and abuse based on what side of the political spectrum it falls on. Which is far worse than any hate speech or abuse that could be said.