Sources have told BuzzFeed that Twitter employees quietly filtered tweets with abusive language for a Q&A session with President Obama, and potentially in another session with celebrity Caitlyn Jenner. A “former senior Twitter employee” says that during a May 2015 #AskPOTUS event, then-CEO Dick Costolo told employees to use an algorithm to filter out abusive tweets, and another source says that a team also manually removed messages that slipped through.
The decision was allegedly made without telling higher-level members of Twitter, in order to avoid objections. But we may have seen a similar kind of filtering before. In 2014, an automated system appeared to be blocking anti-Semitic slurs tweeted at British Parliament member Luciana Berger. Although Twitter didn’t confirm the report at that time, it was a potentially troubling development for a platform that has both expressed a devotion to unfettered speech and notably failed at curbing harassment of non-famous users.
As another BuzzFeed source (along with a larger report on Twitter’s anti-abuse war) notes, the move could be an example of a “double standard” favoring high-profile users whose departure could seriously hurt Twitter’s public image. Earlier this summer, for example, Twitter banned the account of longtime troll Milo Yiannopoulos, but only after a major debacle involving Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. Without further explanation or transparency, removing certain classes of tweets for specific users undercuts Twitter’s attempt to provide a wide platform for speech — while doing little to help the people who are most vulnerable to abuse.
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