As many of you know, Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones was the target of racist, hateful trolls on Twitter. Leslie retweeted some of the abuse, which compared her to animals, insulted her appearance and worse. Sadly, celebrities on Twitter, particularly women, are all too aware of the abusive comments which are permitted on that platform. Trolls and racists have had a home on Twitter for years and little to nothing has been done about it. The good news is that Leslie shed a light on some of Twitter’s roaches and they’re finally addressing the problem. In an interview with Seth Myers on Late Night, Leslie revealed that she had personally met with the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who had worked with her to ban some of the worst accounts. Dorsey had a conference call with investors yesterday, where he discussed Twitter’s efforts to finally crack down on trolling and abuse. Variety has the details of his talk:

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey acknowledged that the company’s efforts in cracking down on hateful and abusive attacks on the social service haven’t gone far enough.

“No one deserves to be the target of abuse on Twitter,” he said on a conference call with investors Tuesday. “We haven’t been good enough at ensuring that’s the case, and we need to do better.”

At the same time, Dorsey insisted that Twitter is not censoring speech: “We are not, and never will be, a platform that shows people only part of what’s happening.” However, he said, “Abuse is not civil discourse.”

According to Dorsey, at the start of the year Twitter identified safety as its No. 1 priority, and “recent events have only confirmed” the importance of that focus.

Among one of the highest-profile incidents recently, actress Leslie Jones was the target of numerous racist comments on Twitter, prompting the “Saturday Night Live” cast member and “Ghostbusters” co-star to announce she was leaving the service. Dorsey personally intervened and met with Jones, and Twitter subsequently banned conservative columnist Milo Yiannopoulos and other accounts over the attacks; Jones has since resumed tweeting.

In announcing its second-quarter 2016 results, Twitter cited several steps it has taken recently to improve safety on the service. The company says it has improved the ability to block other users, and launched a comment-moderation system on Periscope that allows viewers on a broadcast to report and vote in real-time on comments that they consider to be spam or abuse…

“We, along with the broader industry, have a lot more work to do in this area, but we’re committed to continuing to develop tools that will help keep Twitter, Periscope and Vine safe and open for people to connect in real time,” Twitter said in a statement. “We do this work together with the strong communities and partners that exist across all of our products.”

Investors were disappointed with Twitter’s Q2 results and weak outlook for the third quarter, pushing shares down more than 11% in after-hours trading.

[From Variety]

I question why it took Twitter THIS LONG to finally try to institute an effective system against abuse. That should have been part of their business plan from the start and, barring that, they should have put the smack down on trolls as soon as they noticed it was a problem. Twitter has been around for ten years. It took this coming to a head with a public relations disaster, along with a drop in valuation, for them to finally admit it was an issue.

That said, Dorsey did say most of the right things. He admitted that they haven’t done enough so far and said that they’re putting measures into place to stop it. He didn’t have to give any credence to the “free speech” argument though. Twitter is a private platform and they don’t have to cater to the most abusive people citing first amendment rights. It’s reassuring that they’re not going to censor different viewpoints, but that argument from trolls was invalid in the first place.

I just checked Leslie Jones’s twitter and while it’s heartening that she’s back online and staying positive, she’s still receiving some terrible responses to her tweets, including #FreeMilo posts which refer to the Breitbart journalist who was banned for trolling her. Facebook lets you delete and ban people spamming and trolling your page. Twitter should have a similar tool for everyone.

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