Sources: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Secretly Censored Abusive Responses To President Obama

[Sanguine]

The move was conducted in secret, according to well-placed sources.
posted on Aug. 11, 2016, at 7:41 a.m.
Charlie Warzel
BuzzFeed News Reporter

In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a Q&A session, sources tell BuzzFeed News.

According to these sources, the May 2015 #AskPOTUS town hall came out of Twitter senior leadership’s frustration with the fact that platforms like Reddit had become home to celebrity Q&As.

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....

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/sources-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-secretly-censored-abusive-r?utm_term=.eevkQ85XvJ#.vubLya3KRg