Twitter CEO Ashamed For His Failures, Claims His Company Sucks

Twitter CEO Dick Costello now claims he is taking personal responsibility for his companies failures to deal with abusive trolls. He said that Twitter sucked at taking care of the problem. He claimed he was ashamed at his failure as a CEO to rein in such rampant abuse that has taken place for so long. And he now, suddenly, wants to do something about it. I have heard this rant before, usually after someone gets abused in a major way whereby it makes major news. Then the usual raft of carpet burns ensue, and @DickC comes out of his coffin and makes proclamations that soon all will be well. These out of the coffin proclamations also come at investor calls, where investors get to question the company on finances and future business and so forth.

So it comes as no surprise that tomorrow is a big investor call for Twitter, and he probably got wind that somebody might query him about the widespread and rampant abuse on Twitter and ask him just what the hell he intends to do about it.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Dick Costolo wrote:

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.

@dickc

Of course, Dick knows that abuse is rampant on his platform, and he has known it from the beginning. But he and Twitter has failed as a company to do anything about it, and instead allowed the service to become a wild west similar in nature to 4Chan or the old days of DalNet and IRC. He has one thing right though, Twitter can be a hateful place to reside on, and it can be a truly shitty way to message. And nothing has ever been done to clean it up.

Hate and abuse is so embedded into the Twitter platform that it will be almost impossible to clean out. I think abuse has just become part of the synergy that makes Twitter what it is. Getting rid of trolls will be like getting rid of the red tape in Washington. Every time some head cheese comes into office he rides in on a white horse to clean up the dirty old town, talking about how everything will be cleaned up soon. Soon though the new sheriff becomes like the old sheriff he replaced, and in the end nothing ever gets done.

So count me as not being a believer that good old bad old DickC will clean shit up on Twitter. Shit is hard to clean up, and it always leaves a bad smell when you do. Then dogs start coming by and smell where the old shit hole was, and they leave more shit in the same spot. Clean up Twitter? I doubt it. But good luck trying Dick. You will soon learn that Twitter left you long ago and is now owned and operated by trolls, abusers, haters, racists and vicious assholes who live to make others peoples lives miserable. You no longer own Twitter Dick. It was bought out by trolls the minute you allowed them to come in and take over.