Twitter sucks at dealing with trolls and CEO says it's all his fault

Dick Costolo knows Twitter has a problem with abuse and trolls and says it's entirely his fault.

That's according to a memo the CEO reportedly sent to employees earlier this week in which he accepts responsibility for the problems and promises changes are on the way.

The Verge got ahold of two emails, reportedly sent to Twitter employees by Costolo, in which the CEO says he accepts personal responsibility for the problems.

In the first memo, which reportedly came after an employee questioned on an internal forum whether the social network is doing all it can to prevent trolling and abuse, Twitter's top executive admits he's "ashamed" at how the company has handled these issues and promises to "start kicking these people off right and left."

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 a followup email to employees the next day, the CEO again reiterated that he was accepting sole responsibility for the problem.

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.

The recent GamerGate movement, in which many female Twitter users found themselves the target of a barrage of violent threats, has only highlighted Twitter's shortcomings in how it deals with abuse on the platform. Though the company recently rolled out better reporting tools, many users have still criticized Twitter for not doing enough.

Posted by : Gizmeon