Sources familiar with the matter alleged that Costlo, who stepped down as Twitter boss in June previous year, ordered the site’s employees to implement an in-house algorithm in order to filter out unsavory language directed at Obama.
Advertisement
According to Buzzfeed News, citing a company insider, then-CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered Twitter employees to filter out abusive replies to the president during his May 2015 #AskPOTUS digital town hall.
A different source said individuals from Twitter’s media partnerships team also manually censored tweets because the algorithm was inconsistent and couldn’t be exclusively relied on. Most of the time, Twitter users are left alone to deal with abuse; but when the President of the United States uses Twitter, the company is apparently willing to be a bit more proactive in its efforts to address harassment.
“Two sources told BuzzFeed News that this decision was kept from senior company employees for fear they would object to the decision”, said the publication.
“We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet”, co-founder Biz Stone said in the blog post, “but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content”.
“There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam”, the post read.
These revelations are quite awkward, given Twitter’s repeated public stands against censorship and its self-proclaimed status as the “free speech wing of the free speech party”.
Another anonymous source told BuzzFeed that Twitter did the same thing during a Q&A with Caitlyn Jenner.
Advertisement
“This was another example of trying to woo celebs and show that you can have civilized conversations without the hate even if you’re a high-profile person”, the source said. The former executive did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for clarification on Twitter, and did not respond to BuzzFeed’s requests for comment as the report was being written.
