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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.

3 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

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    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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    I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit