In an interview with the New York Times Farhad Manjoo, Dick Costolo, Twitter s CEO, described the fine line the company has to walk when it comes to dealing with online abuse.
Costolo recently sent an internal memo to staff saying that the company needed to do better when it came to protecting its users, as I wrote earlier this month.
The company has always taken allegations of abuse seriously, Costolo told the Times. But the cost of dealing with harassment, he said, shouldn t be on the person who is harassed.
In addition, Costolo said when dealing with speech, the situation is often tricky. Some examples of abuse are actually rational political discourse and not abuse. But Twitter has to set its policies and try to stick with them, he said, adding:
One way of thinking about it is: I may have a right to say something, but I don t have a right to stand in your living room and scream it into your ear five times in a row. Right? I think there are things you can do on the platform that are of varying degrees of severity — not just black and white.
Above: (Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group)
