An internal memo sent out to Twitter employees, obtained by The Verge, reveals candid comments made by CEO Dick Costolo about the company’s shortcomings in dealing with harassment and cyber bullying.
Abusive behavior on Twitter is driving away core users, the CEO believes, which is why it has become a priority for the company to quell the rampant trolling.
Costolo takes full responsibility for his company’s failure to adequately address these issues. In the full company memo below, you can read what he intends to do about it:
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.
Twitter recently released some tools to make it easier for users to report abuse when they see it, or if they are victims of it themselves.
This is yet another initiative in Costolo’s campaign to grow Twitter’s user base and make it accessible to more users. With it’s quarterly earnings call coming up tomorrow, the company needs to prove to investors it has a plan to not only accelerate its growth but prevent current users from leaving the network.
