Can Twitter curb #incivility? CEO vows to kick trolls off 'right and left.'

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote in an internal e-mail that the company is losing users by not addressing harassment by trolls. But civil libertarians and free speech advocates argue Twitter’s vitality could be imperiled by such a move to censor its users.

Can Twitter do anything about its #incivility?

Indeed, can the Twitterverse, having now become a central node in the nation’s digital public sphere – and a key forum for political debate, self-expression, and the rough-and-ready swirl of human discourse – do anything about #trolls and #misogyny?

The issue has become a critical one for the eight-year-old social network, which provides a 140-character-sized public podium for almost 300 million monthly active users. After a tumultuous first year as a publicly traded company, one that witnessed a 40 percent stock price drop, it’s itching to impress Wall Street, expand its user base, and increase its ever-essential #bottomline.

But just as investors awaited Twitter’s fourth quarter earnings report Thursday afternoon, the company and its CEO were grappling not only with the vicissitudes of capitalism, but the hordes of “trolls” that roam its digital landscape, hurling vitriol and abuse at other users – especially the emotional manipulation and threats of sexual violence directed mostly at women on the site.   

"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in an internal memo obtained by The Verge, a technology and culture site. "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."

The company, experts say, certainly needs to do better in attracting new users as Wall Street investors look on. But can Twitter, a central node in the nation’s privately mediated digital public sphere, enhance the nation’s civility by censoring trolls?

The embattled Mr. Costolo, under fire for his company’s tepid performance on Wall Street this year, took “personal responsibility” for the numerous controversies that have sprung up the past few years, as more and more women face threats of rape, sexual insults, and “doxxing” – the term used for the troll harassment technique of finding and then posting a user’s sensitive personal information, including addresses, phone numbers, and even Social Security numbers. 

“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,” Costolo told his employees. “Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.”

Indeed, industry analysts cite the company’s slowing growth in new users as one reason for investor skepticism in the company.

But at the same time, argue some civil libertarians and free speech advocates, Twitter’s very vitality could be imperiled by such a move to censor its users, however vile their tweets.

Any attempt to enforce civility in Twitter’s free-wheeling Wild West-like marketplace of ideas could backfire, some experts say, and actually send many core users elsewhere. And the attempt could require complex and imperfect algorithms necessary to curate the hundreds of millions of conversations that take place within the social media space each day – a drag on the media site’s that could produce an overall chilling effect.

“We’ve always had this tension between the need for the marketplace of ideas to be as diverse as possible, as vibrant as possible, and therefore full of trolls and idiots, and the desire for a kind of elevated level of civic discourse that would improve the quality of the conversation – but by excluding certain voices,” says Aram Sinnreich, professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information in New Brunswick, N.J.

It’s a tension that has long existed in the American public sphere, scholars say, where the concept of a self-determining democracy is guided by a shared conversation, often messy and contentious and offensive, and mostly mediated by the private enterprises of a free press.

But certain voices, mostly male and anonymous, have been assiduously attempting to silence and intimidate others, including minorities and women – especially those with feminist ideas. 

Last October, the feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who has campaigned against the rampant violence against women in video games, canceled an appearance at Utah State University after the school received a number of emails threatening a terrorist massacre.

Ms. Sarkeesian and other feminist critics were relentlessly trolled under the hashtag “Gamergate” – an amorphous though coordinated movement of mostly male trolls that “doxxed,” harassed, and sexually threatened women who spoke against the misogyny of the tech world.

Last week, Sarkeesian catalogued the vile threats she received in just one week in January.

The problem of incivility and cyberbullying in the public conversations taking place online has long been an issue for media sites who enable user commentary. Last year, Reuters.com removed their comments sections. (The Christian Science Monitor dropped user comments in 2012 as it became more difficult and time consuming to moderate the amount of vitriol they produced.)

Other sites, including CNN, Popular Science, and the Gawker media family of sites, have either shut down or curtailed their comments because of trolls who have “given us a stunning example of just how unfathomably ugly the internet can be,” one site explained. And most of these organizations said the most robust conversations, trolls or no, were already moving to social media platforms like Twitter.

“Twitter isn’t going to be the tail that wags society’s dog and fix our misogyny problem by imposing top-down limitations on the speech of its user base,” says Professor Sinnreich. “Women bear a disproportionate brunt of the vitriol on Twitter because women bear the disproportionate brunt of vitriol in our society.” 

Sexism and misogyny remain stubbornly part of society, he points out, “and that shows up on Twitter, just as it shows up on the street. Women get most of the cat calls and harassment on public streets, but you don’t blame the street for that.”

The internal memos at Twitter, too, were sparked by an essay by the feminist writer Lindy West, who on Monday also catalogued the trolling she’s endured for her posts on the social site. One troll set up a Twitter account under the name of Ms. West's father, who is deceased, grabbed publicly available photos of her dad, and then used the account to harass her.

“I’m aware that Twitter is well within its rights to let its platform be used as a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment,” she wrote in The Guardian. “But, as a private company – just like a comedian mulling over a rape joke, or a troll looking for a target for his anger – it could choose not to. As a collective of human beings, it could choose to be better.”