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Twitter CEO personally responsible for not dealing with online abuse

It’s no secret that online abuse on Twitter is out of hand – not enough is being done to deal with the issue. Twitter’s CEO Dick Cosotolo has reportedly admitted that this is a big problem and has said that it’s entirely his fault.

The statements were made in two emails obtained by The Verge sent to employees via the company’s internal forum as a response to a question raised about the effectiveness of the social network’s measurements to deal with online abuse.

Here’s the text from the first email Costolo sent:

We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.

We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.
Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.

In the second email, Costolo again takes full blame for the situation:

Let me be very very clear about my response here. I take PERSONAL responsibility for our failure to deal with this as a company. I thought i did that in my note, so let me reiterate what I said, which is that I take personal responsibility for this. I specifically said “It’s nobody’s fault but mine”

We HAVE to be able to tell each other the truth, and the truth that everybody in the world knows is that we have not effectively dealt with this problem even remotely to the degree we should have by now, and that’s on me and nobody else. So now we’re going to fix it, and I’m going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.

In December, Twitter announced it had improved its abuse reporting process, making it more mobile-friendly and easier for users to report abusers.

The company, however, has admitted that it still has a long way to go in this regard and that it will continue working on making more changes.

[Source – The Verge, Image CC. 2.0/ TechCrunch]

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