A Million Different Twitters
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Hey, a quick heads up the second half. The episode contains descriptions of sexual harassment and graphic threats of violence. Exact till codes will be in the shower notes.

One of my friends was the first female engineering twitter and point of fact, and SHE reached out to me one day and he said, hey, dell, we're trying to see occasional spam on twitter. And when I think about bad things on the internet, I think about you.

Dell harvey was twitters twenty fifth employee in two thousand and eight. He started as the head of twitters newly created spam and abuse team. SHE was also the only member of that team. Harvey already had plenty of experience cleaning up bad stuff on the internet, but some things on twitter still managed to surprise, for example, brazilian teenage girls.

I'm just going to tell you, there are one of the strongest forces on the planet.

There are a lot of them on twitter. And they became such a headache for harvey that you gave them an acron B. T. G. And the reason harvey was dealing with them as the B T G, we're using twitter to talk to celebrities they were especially interested in once celebrity who joined the platform in march two thousand nine.

Lots of guys is Justin paper. You guys aren't low. me. Follow me twitter out in.

beeper. So every day they would wake up and they would tweet, add, Justin bieber, love you. Come to brazil.

Bieber, love you. Come to brazil. Adjust in bieber, love you. Come to brazil. Over and over again.

We love you. Justin bieber, come to brazil is a totally fine thing to say on twitter. Remember, twitter's first use case was, i'm going to this bar. The problem was the volume of people talking to Justin bieber.

They weren't intending to span. They just really wanted Justin biber to counter brazil.

The problem B, T, G created for twitter as they made twitter look like IT was mostly adjust in bieber fan site. If you looked at twitters list of trending topics, a rudimentary way to see what people were tween about on the site. IT was dominated by those B T G machines, but twitter obviously wanted other people to use the platform too. So del harvey had to figure out a way to deep bieber the whole thing.

The first thing we did was like, you know what? Let's make IT so that if the tweet are exact, duplicate walkout, one towards the trend instead of all ten, cool, done and dusted.

But IT takes more than a rule change to derail B. T, G, they responded by tweet, each tweet just a bit.

Beeper love you. Come on. Bieber, you come to brazil two, adjust in. Bieber, love you come to brazil three, crap. Now they're not duplicate anymore.

So twitter responded again. This time IT simply changed with trending meant IT tweet its algorithm to consider the fresh ness of a topic, not just this, your volume of tweet about IT. So IT take a real Spike in conversation for something to trend and sense.

B, T, G were always tweet about Justin bieber. They fell out. Other rankings, problem solved.

And there was a happy ending for the B. T. G, S, too.

I will say that Justin did go to brazil.

so so follow.

And then they start tweet at Justin beeper, we love you. Please come back to brazil, which really felt like we were full circle in the whole thing.

Deeper san was not a problem. Dell Harry expected to discover a twitter, but IT turned out to be the kind of thing he dealt with all the time. He would look at weird stuff people did on twitter and had to figure out if I was okay.

know a lot of what my job really was. And a good twenty five percent of that, at least the beginning, was just staring at what people were doing and trying to figure out what they were doing. And if I was problematic, and if we should stop them or help them or tell them what they're doing is having a negative consequence or leave that alone entirely.

delle harvey and twitter ended up dealing with much, much more complicated problems than excited Justin bieber fans. But even as twitter grew, IT never outgrew this car. Cannon, who runs this place, the company or its users.

On Peter kafka, this is land of the giants, the twitter fantasy.

Twitter is a big and complicated place. And so for this episode, I wanted to help expLoring IT. So i'm turning my power law n good known forever didn't just age out that I learned she's a senior writer in pod caster at wired. He learned.

hey Peter, things for having me be a part of this.

Are you put on twitter forever? You have tried all the things. You use all the things. Part of your job to use all the things was so unique about twitter.

Well, as a journalist, I found what are really valuable for a long time because of the way I, I don't know, was a portal to what was going on in the world. I used this to connect with sources slightly to people's dm, that sort of thing. That's one example. But that's exactly what's unique about twitter is that I could be anything for anyone. I mean, yes, you were broadcasting things to the world, but IT could also be your own little space on the internet where you found community.

I don't think for people who cover tech like us, it's particularly interesting because we're used to the story of the tech dude in the garage, the stanford dorm making the thing.

And with twitter, that wasn't necessarily the case, right? IT was the people who are using IT who started to do kind of weird things on there. And that made twitter into what IT is.

Yet the guys who built twitter didn't know what they wanted twitter to be in. The user stepped in and said, here's what it's gonna. And then they said that one hundred thousand and million different times, because they created a million different versions of twitter.

right? And that I think the uniqueness of twitter, but it's also its liability. So that's what our epson is about today that push pull between platform in people and how those people made twitter the best and worst place on the internet.

One of the indexing things about twitter is just how open IT is. He didn't have to be invited to the party to join the conversation. You could shop to any party.

IT sort of was this internet open? Mike IT was this democratized space where you can sort of type into the void.

In two thousand and eleven, best cob had a day's b in journalism, but he turned out what he really liked was typing jokes into the twitter void. Something about twitter felt like a literal open mike night. But with even lower stakes.

was this sort of like everyone got the same prompt every day, which was like the news or the human condition, and then write into the space with a sentence and a half your funnest take.

What kind of funny things were you're writing on twitter at the begin?

I remember one that got me disinvited from a part. Luck IT was so sad and beautiful that my generation will extinguish itself with homemade community garden jamb butcha ism. My lovely friend, who is still a friend, made a lot of jam at the time, and he took a persons.

so he said, because of your tweet, please don't come to my plock was .

one of those things were like, that week I didn't get the invitation. I was like, I know.

This was back in twitters early days when users were actively trying to figure out just what they could do with the service. One of those things would follow friday when users would highlight other accounts they thought we're cool or useful or whatever with the idea that you'd want to follow them too. One friday, cob GTA boost from an actual comedian, rob daley.

he wrote, super funny person alert. And then I had my handle. And then that instant my twitter blew up, and I went from having one hundred fifty followers to something like eleven hundred followers. Overnight I called my mom, and SHE was like, oh my god, how much money does this mean? And I was like, zero, zero dollars.

Like, she's like, great.

Another two years on our health care.

Normally, twitter fame doesn't give you anything, but more twitter fame, but in this case, IT actually did lead to something. Nail scovel, a writer for David letter man, and the simpsons and a million and other shows reached out on twitter SHE.

D. M. I. And was like, hey, I just read through your archive and you should come to lay and sleep on my couch and I want to introduce you to some people and I wrote back, oh, so fluttering. Thank you so much to take care all the best.

But scovel was persisted and cob fluid L. A. About a year later, SHE landed a job writing for Jimmy camel.

She's still making TV today. So best cow made up pretty well on twitter. And to go for you.

learn well, a mile. The embarrass to admit that I did participate and follow friday is in the early days. So i'm glad you gave out a shout out, but unfortunately i'm still waiting for my TV writing deal from jimmie camel.

But that was the whole vibe on twitter back in the early twenty ten, right? IT was fun. IT was chaotic, but IT was also maybe professionally useful, and IT was so easy to meet interesting strangers. Or Better yet, define yourself in a twitter corner with strangers who were into the same things that you are. Take ana gifts of poco argument, who in twenty seventeen was studying math and college.

One of my mentors is actually the first black woman I had ever met, who had not been an economist, basically encouraged me to join something called e con twitter. I went on twitter specifically to learn more about, like, who is considering economists. Because when I first enter economics, I google economics.

And then a bunch of picture showed up. And none of those individuals look like me. Allow them were White guys, older White guys. They all went to harvard, heal or princeton. So I think for me I was like, you know, if there's this community that exists of economists that look more like the communities that am a part of, I really want to engage with that. There was like learning from those individuals.

And real time IT seems pretty obvious to say now. But twitter was about conversations, not comments. On facebook, you would leave a comment on a friends post. But on twitter, ideally, you were in a back and forth a poco argument, thinks that this has changed the entire discipline of economics.

Twitter has become a little bit like a virtual seminaries. Everybody can see the exchange happening in real time, right? And anybody can work in before twitter.

everyone knew who paul krugman was. The most economists warrant microcephalous. Now, IT was possible to make a name for yourself by sharing your ideas on twitter.

E, on twitter. In my painting on has flat in economics. You have people who would never engage with somebody because they feel like there in the top apartment or whatever, sliding in other 是 dms， right?

I just part of myself inserted myself. It's a different conversations that I thought we're interesting and I didn't expect these people to respond. They did ice LED into Chelsea clinton S. D. ms. And now she's my mentor.

So here's something crucial about twitter. It's a network of networks all running at the same time without any prompting from the people who actually run the platform.

But twitter users weren't just creating their own spaces. They also created actual features. They wish twitter head, you might say, twitter head, millions of people working on the product for free.

I think it's an important part of the brand.

Here's Jason gold man twitter er's first actual product bus.

I think that the idea that the product was so simple and allowed for so much play that users were unable to kind of push the boundaries of what the platform and be becomes a really important part of the story. Or even though the process was fAiling from a technical perspective, people felt very attached to IT. And without that, we would have been a lot of trouble.

which is how we get to the hashtag, hey Justin.

I mean, h tag.

just busy hashtag rising. Have tag is IT friday yet? By twenty thirteen, hashtags were ubiquitous enough to get spooked by Jimmy found in and just intirely a national T.

V. Pretty passed from those people, except over on tiktok, which is weird. But early in twitter er's life, they were a crucial, if confusing, part of the companies is architecture, even though they weren't created by a Jason golden and crew.

I almost think that I was a late comer to twitter, even though I was the one thousand, one hundred and sixty eight user .

Christmas sina work in tech in sanford, isco. And he was one of those guys who didn't just work in tech. He loved tech. He was a self described product therapies. He did not fall in love with twitter at first site.

If you think about twitter back then, that was mostly just a message fan out service, meaning that you post a message to this real and then IT sends a message out to anyone who's like listening. That's all I did. There were no trendy topics.

There wasn't like an explore tab. There wasn't even search. I mean, twitter was so primitive, so basic.

but that also met machine of felt at an open invitation to make twitter Better. Even though he didn't work there.

we had to invent and then cajole twitter into adopting some of these formats and ideas. And if they we're going to do that, we were gonna do with ourself.

Macos bio says he invented the hashtag, but that's not strictly true. Some corners of the internet people were already using a pound sign to classify keywords in a string of characters. And on flickr, the early photo sharing site, people use hashtag to help describe their photos, which made the site searching and more social.

On twitter, you could use a hashtag, but I didn't really do anything. Matina thought the twitter should make hashtags linkable. So when you click on hashtag, Jimmy found, you find all the other tweet from people talking about Jimmy fallon.

Back in the beginning of the second internet boom. You didn't really need an invitation to pitch twitter on something. If you had the audacity, you could just show up at the officers and start talking like machine E I did in two thousand and seven.

I wrote this proposal. I actually made mockup s. And then I took the idea, basically read into twitter's headquarters in south park. I kind of walked in the front door because there was no security. The door was like White open.

The problem with this approach is that twitters leaders did not want what mechano was selling.

Look, I will say I hate hash tangs Jason .

godman again.

I think part of our bias against them was this is like web one shit. However, I was also against tweet as like a non so like, you know, maybe my taste is just terrible.

Christmas scene is still maybe a little bit strong about being brushed off.

I just remember the rejection was just so kind of just, this is too nerdy. This never onna work. You know, the people who make decisions about the future twitter were not interested in what I had .

to offer at that time. But eventually, mica and the users, or maybe reality one, twitter realized at some point that linkable hashtags did make the site easier to navigate. And also they could sell sponsored hashtags as an add product revenue.

So in the end, twitter got behind the hashtag, but IT was the users who figured out what could really make them special.

When I was on twitter at ten o'clock night, eleven o'clock night, what I was seeing was very different than the new space conversation that I was having during the day.

Marth Clark is a professor of communication studies at northeast n. university. He was also an early twitter user. So SHE saw some of the earliest touch tags.

A lot of things at that time had the hashtag after dark on them, and after dark signals. The people that, you know, this is sort of like H, B, O, after eight o'clock. It's not going to a be P, G, thirteen. We're gna get rated r territory. We're going to get into x territory.

The we here is important in theory, could be anyone on after dark. In reality, Clark was connecting with a specific set of twitter users.

and that is how black twitter became apparent to me that there were people who were using this platform in completely different ways. Then I think IT had been conceived even by its creators.

SHE is tapped into black twitter, twitter's best known homegrown space. For me.

two thousand nine was the year that everything started really coming together for black twitter.

Jason pym writes about black internet culture. He wrote an oral history of black twitter for wired.

you have the death of Michael Jackson, and this is the first time we're really seeing black folks coming together, grieving for this person, who in some ways felt like a family member to them. A few days later, you have the bee t awards, and then later that year you have the PH tech, a sort of threads everything together. You know, your black win.

actually. Weather spon is an entrepreneur in new ork city. In two thousand and nine, he was working with singer and former disney star Adrian billon. N weather spoon was trying to drum up hashtags that would help connect billon hot to her fans.

He was raining, and there was a girl walking outside and SHE drew a plastic bag over her head. And I turned to age, and I was like, you know, you black wind girl and SHE started dying laughing. Later that day, I got on the train and I saw another moment that just is like, there is my black folks again, just being nice. I got off the train and I threw the hashtag up. And I started going crazy like.

you know your black when you cancel your plans when it's raining outside and within a few hours, IT is its volcanic. We hadn't seen black folks really coral together on a specific cash tag.

You know, you're black when you get the edas after eating a Hardy meal. You know, you're black when you show up during puberty and your aunts talking about your beating.

you have people piling on top of the original tweet. You know, you're black when you know used to have twenty. And rams is people sharing experiences that feel powerful to them on the platform around the ash tag.

For me, IT was another day playing with a hashtag. What is meant to other black people, though across twitter was that there was a space for us, a space for us to laugh at ourselves, a space for us to unite. People weren't code switching in this space.

We were using words, phrases in hash tags that had significant cultural meaning with in black communities. So IT wasn't just happening in a barber shop or in a beauty salon or in a traditional layer hyste icy black space. IT was happening on the internet where anyone could see what those conversations were like.

Merita Clark, again, something else that made that Frankness possible was the platforms, anonymity on twitter. Your account didn't have to be connected to your real identity. You could use whatever name you wanted. And for some people, that meant they could be more authentic.

So I was using IT professionally, but then I also had a burner account so that I could have fun without, you know, damage or risk to my job.

Have you ever shared that burner account name?

Absolutely not.

That's in the volt. Yes, black witter could be all kinds of things. IT was also one thing. In particular.

black twitter is funny, because black people, particularly in the united states, often use humor as a coping mechanism for the things that we experience. So everything from everyday racism to really traumatic incidents, I can even go back to one of the best days within black twitter was the day that yahoo news published the story. The headline was, trump, once a bigger navy, but someone accidentally hit the n key instead of the b key.

And so I said, trump wants, in n word, navy. And black twitter took that idea of, you know, what a black maybe would look like, even this using this majority, and just had an absolute field making fun of what that might be like. And that is a reflection of what it's like to use humor to cope with the use of painful appetites, even when they are actually all with the reality of being black in this society.

I think what black twitter does so well is this idea of signifying and being able to remix an idea and shift the meeting of IT just a little bit.

Jason parham, again.

So black life for so long has been devalued in the media as we've been told that this is one thing. And so twitter gave us the chance to shift that, to radically alter that perception and saying, hey, look what's actually happening or look what's happening in our communities.

Over the years, black twitter became a force of its own. Even if you'd never heard of that, you bounced into IT on the platform. And in real life, black twitter created culture, and I was power that any user can tap into. Like tiki James, James is an avid birder who often found himself on bird twitter, which, as you can probably guess, was a place for people who liked tweet about birds. But in twenty twenty, the conversations James had online and are especially on twitter, changed.

We're reflecting on the news of George floyd, were gonna Taylor in a modbury robbery.

was lunched while jogging through a suburban georgia? This was close to home for James.

A lot of people go building in the same way that he would just go jogging in some nebber od or near your neighborhood.

IT could have happened to any one of them. Then James saw a video of Christian Cooper, a black bird watch in new york, being arrest in a park. The video blew up on twitter. And then on national .

TV new details this morning of a central park confrontation gone viral.

Please don't compost me.

Please don't compost me. A White woman calling the police after a black man says he asked her to lead her dog in central park.

Please call the clubs.

I'm going to tell them there's an african american man threatened my life.

Please tell them whatever you like.

There is an african american man. I hope he is recording me to Better myself in my dog. I'm sorry, I can't agree that having thread by a man in the rebel, we on the conformation.

the story of the cooker incident, how IT was told, we realized there's so much attention of the racial dynamics of this country, and so many of them are focused on trauma. IT is true. The black experience has trauma because of what this country is.

However, the black experience goes beyond trauma. The black experience includes joy, pride, resistance, strength and style. And what can we do to celebrate that into center, that in a way that we all really need? IT right now? Hashtag black birds week.

the hashtag caught on. Thousands of people started tweet about their own experiences about being black and being outside.

I had a friend of mine give me the data set, four black birds week, for, I think IT was the week in a couple days after over three hundred million impressions on that hashtag, to show that there was that much attention, that much appetite, that much celebration.

James doesn't think that black birders, we could have happened on any other platform.

Twitter was public. what? There is the most public forum for someone to post a video, make a tweet, share a hashtag that anybody else can tap click and then get into.

So twitter users helped turn twitter into a powerful place, but who got to use that power and how do they use IT? That's after the break.

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So here is a pattern. Twitter users start doing something on their own because that makes sense to them. Then eventually, twitter's leadership turns those behaviors into features. The hashtag was one example. There are other even more primitive ones, like at first, the retweet was a user hack.

When people wanted to share someone else's tweet, they would copy and pace the original tweet, and then they would type the letters rt in front of that. And IT was the same thing with the at mention. At one point, if you wanted everyone in your twitter timing to see what you were saying to another person, you had to be a period in front of the at symbol and then the person.

These hacks were just that hacks. And only a subset of hearts even understood how they worked until twitter integrated them both into the platform, which is cool. But new features come with new problems.

You know, it's the the visionary, right? Like these guys created something that they thought would be fun. And then IT took off. They were focused on the building and the creating and all the cool things that come along with that.

Del harvey.

again and IT also meant that I at that point would usually be entering much like debby downer, with a one. So guys, here's a thing I was thinking about.

Harvey was the one who had to deal with the unintended consequences, like the sheet .

retweet was when quote, tweet came about, right? Because then I became the dunk on.

yeah, let me a commentary and then shoot IT out to my followers who might be a very different audience than the original tweet was intended for. You can see where things can go, arrive so well, it's great to listen to your users is also complicated. Which users do you listen to?

Michael sippy, who was twitter's V P of product back in twenty thirteen, was grappling with this when users started complaining about a fundamental part of the site. The block function block allowed you to cut someone off from seeing or interacting with your tweet. The thing is, if you block someone, they could find out .

we were hearing about this from folks with very large followings that we're like, hey, what's happening is like I tried to block somebody and other people will come and essentially attack me.

Some users, like celebrities, wanted a more polite way to filter certain people out of their fees. So so I thought, okay, why not replaced block button with mute? Here's dell harari again.

So just mute, right? Like you're not block. You can still follow me and see all my content, but I don't have to see all of your content.

You can read my tweet, you can respond, but I will never see anything, and you will never know which is exactly what the people complaining to sip I wanted.

So we shipped that and that was a mistake.

They rolled out the launch and immediately people started absolutely losing IT.

That's because a whole bunch of other people relied on twitter's block function specifically. They relied on having control over who can see what they wrote. Maybe, for instance, they were blocking a trowel, and I just felt safer to know that tool couldn't monitor their tweet.

We had a lot of feedback from the community that like changing a block into a mute sentiment, removes the agency of the person, is actually doing the blocking and IT was very IT was really upsetting and and like I actually, I really regret that decision.

Milk only lasted a day. There was, after all, a simple solution. Keep both. You can block or you can mute. But the fact that this all got so complicated and that I got emotional, even for some people, is a tested to how messa can be for a platform to follow the users lead. Sometimes even the most well meaning users will disagree on what they need. So what happens when twitter is caught in a push pull with users who are not so well, meaning people who don't want to make twitter Better, people who want to make IT worse?

I think if you have a couple hundred million people on the internet in one location, that doesn't take a lot of people to actually make IT bad for everybody else.

Royal and as a crack is an artist and writer. Normally their timeline was full of tweet about black radical thought, feminist theory and of course, scandal hot takes. But when crocket log doma spring twenty fourteen, they notice something off.

I'm seeing to saying things like, oh, well, if you celebrate fathers and you're upholding the patriarch because fathers are the one of them compare father's data, sexual assaults so it's just ridiculous, just completely like just Bakers crock .

noticed the hashtag and father's day everywhere IT was the kind of proposed us get a lot of this idea that people couldn't help but share on twitter. And IT migrated the way wild stuff on twitter often migrates from there to the rest of the world. And some outlets, like fox news, took the idea at face value.

Start is a joke, but the hashtag and father's day is picking up steam with feminist online and with others and social media. They not interest in the ending in really what they want. Crack wasn't new to the internet when something smelled off.

They knew where to look. Straights to fortune, the anything goes message board, beloved by tools and other creeps. Sure enough, cricket found them there, jining up a hooks.

Their idea was that we are going to create these plausible women of color, feminist of color, and we're going to make these avataras just say the most unhinged things, just the most ridiculous things. You know, the idea is to poison water so that these type of women would not be taken seriously.

IT was pretty easy to, on earth, a fake father's day twitter.

You can tell this astral turf because we didn't know what these accounts were like. We have never seen these accounts before.

The tools didn't use their real names, of course, but you could sniff that out, crack. And others responded. They would retweet and tag the fakers with their own hashtag your slip is showing, and encourage their followers to block the tools. And then the tools responded to cross ts response.

They regroup and then was just like, alright, we'll take what we learn from this using far right web spaces to organize and then amplifying the harassment by treating numerous accounts to turn off the volume like overwhelm their targets.

There are moments where certain events give you a preview of the future. They show you what possible.

John donovan is a professor at boston university who specializes in online misinformation and disinformation.

When IT comes to social media, we didn't really know what was gonna happen, especially the difference between what happens when one person's is doing something and what happens when thousands of people are doing .

something down. Van says that n father's day was a key moment, a moment that Crystalized a certain kind of tooling behavior IT. Set a playbook, make fake accounts to use in a targeted campaign, use that campaign to capture more attention, and then repeat later. That year twenty fourteen, the tls took the lessons from n father's day and supersize them.

I certainly gotten threats on the internet before, but you've gotten, understand, this was a delusion of them beyond what anyone's brain could process.

Bria wu is a video game developer. SHE got into the industry because he loves games, and he wanted more people to love games.

I'm a child of the eighties and nineteen. I've always felt that this was really true. I was a kid that we always shipped games when men got to be the hero and women were always get the reward of the girlfriend.

Or, you know, just the thing you are searching for. What happened with supremity, a brothers in eighty five? So I really just want you to build games where someone else got to be the star.

Wu ran her own game development studio. SHE was also in online conversations about the game industry shows anim. The stuff had happened both on screen and behind the scenes, and that enraged a certain part of the internet.

We really awakened this right wing, reactionary force online that pursue us and try to silence us.

In twenty fourteen, we became the target of one of the most coordinated and overwhelming online harassment campaigns in the history of the internet. The men who came after will and other women used the hashtag gamer gate, just like and father's day. They wanted to undermine the genuine conversation women were having about massaging in the industry.

On message boards outside of twitter, tools padded, had to take down the women speaking up. They pretended to be upset about quote, quote, ethics and video game journalism. But this was basically as bogus as as, and fathers deg. Gamer gate was so powerful that I became short hand for how a very small group can organize in her rest people on mind. Woo's first instinct was to ignore IT, which was the standard advice for dealing with all my bullies.

don't feed the troll, can keep your head down, don't say the wrong thing, and don't keep drawn into public fights, right? I thought about IT, and I I really asked myself if I would be able to live with myself five, ten years down the line, if I just SAT down and did nothing time, or women, or being run out of the game industry right and left. And I realized I would regret that if I didn't. So I came back online and as I guess what game again, i'm not going anywhere.

Woo sent out a series of tweet mocking metros.

the tools escalate ted. This account pounds back as, guess what, bitch, I know where you live. Your dead middle ted corpse is gonna on the front page of just about tonight i'm onna.

Cut off your husbands asian penis and rape with IT until you believe if you have any children they're going to die too. You did nothing worthwhile with your life and a whole bunch of other harm you know hundreds of people there you're telling me they're able to come murder me. I've got you men in a skull mass calling a knife up to the camera and explaining how to can stick through my throat on video at me. There's no other word for petro matiz ing.

People have been behaving badly on the internet since dialup modems, but twitter is rare and how briana wu was harassed. The tools used twitter features to supercharge their campaign hashtags, help them coordinate their efforts. Retreat gave thousands of people access to her private information like her home address, twitters embrace of anonymity, let the tools Operate without worrying about repercussions. When we ve got in touch with twitter, del harvey was no longer working on her own. SHE now had a team who could help you deal with the worst of the attacks.

Twitter gave me resources on the twitter trust and safety team, where I could send a death threat and have IT taken more seriously than, you know, just someone without that contact. The twitter trust in a safety team was trying to counteract .

the next moves of the mob. But the mob move fast, changing their tactics.

Game figured out way to a write bots that every time I would tweet something, no matter what, IT would link a bunch of, like, hateful this information right underneath that in an image link. And I would also spend that to anyone who replied to me.

twitter, try to catch up with woods help.

Eventually, IT moved into helping the develop policies around how to suspend account multiple death threats. IT was this real, almost unpaid, engineering advisory role that took on with twitter, just trying to help them understand what was going on a technical level and make a Better product going .

back to that time period. How did this whole experience change the way you use social media?

I think there's a short term answer that IT really damaged me in a very public way. And I think there's a later answer that they kind of took a certain degree of my humanity away from me. Yes, the reality is that kind of abuse you don't come back from, you just you change in.

Nowadays, when someone sends me a rape threat, I will look at IT. I sit there and I go, I know I shall be feeling something. I know I should be feeling scared, angry, pissed off, afraid. I know I should feel something, and I just, I feel none inside. And I know i'm so much more cynical today than I was during game, or kate and I I really we regret losing those parts of myself.

Even embedded in that question, how did you change the way you use social media? Really puts the honest on you. Whether the platforms should have changed. Ideally society would have evolved, but instead it's really still on you. The person who was arrested.

you know, I really believe if you build a community and a product to give a responsibility to make IT safe for people to use IT. But that's just not the culture we have.

Rona, who grew up loving video games and SHE no longer makes them in some ways the tools one who didn't leave the internet entirely SHE still on twitter. And after an unsuccessful run for congress in twenty eighteen, SHE turned her attention to helping progressive politicians with their online strategies.

Gamer gate helps solidify bad behavior as part of a twitter brand. So much so in twenty fifteen, twitter CEO to soa did something other social media bosses never did. He owned up to IT in a company wide memo costal a rote we suck at dealing with abuse, and we 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.

Remember, even when twitter was growing fast, IT was still a tiny platform compared to facebook. And eventually twitter stopped growing fast, and that meant had to work harder to find and keep new users. Being known as a toxic health ite didn't help.

We were seeing abuse on the platform. And I think that, no, I can just look back and say we didn't invest enough.

It's Michael sipi, a an who ran product under costolo.

We had a fantastic trust and safety team, but they were pretty understaffed, which again is partly on me and partly on the rest of the executive team.

But it's possible twitter could have never spent its way out of this problem. Jason goldman thinks one reason twitter was slow to react to some of these issues had to do with who was running twitter.

The executive team, apple twitter and most of the other social media companies is promptly White do and like you just experience a different level of online interaction, then literally any other group of people in the world, like whether you a woman or your black or your a not english speaker, and we were just kind of blind to that.

The golbin also thinks the twitter, along with every other social media company, was just too slow to realize just how much work I would have to do to manage the way users use and abuse the platform. The moderation isn't an after thought. It's business for too long.

the industry .

and .

I put myself in this category, thought of content moderation as like fixing bugs, like, oh like people will abuse the system and will just a patch IT. We no, no, these aren't bugs that you need defects. This is like the feature. This is like what you are actually providing to the world is a Better experience for the type of content that is being seen.

Dell harvey says senior leadership wasn't really interested in abuse unless IT ended up a newsstands. Then we'd asked, how did this happen?

And then you explain and then they're like, oh yeah, we'll get you some more engineers and the engineers don't come and then you have the conversation again the next time.

Harvey understands why her team didn't get the resources SHE needed. But that's different than feeling good about IT.

The storied visionaries wanted all of those things that I wanted to support and trust and safety. And the chAllenge was that when you're looking at the short term in your things, are spend this quarter building a new user facing cool feature or spend this quarter building internal infrastructure and tooling that will make your ability to respond to x tickets much more robust. These are facing feature tends to win and not so much the internal tools.

Those tradeoffs and tensions harvey is talking about and the blind spots goldman is talking about exist everywhere at every internet company. But there's something else going on with twitter what is unique about twitter's ability to amplify ideas that is just made IT and is so different from .

other platforms. It's all the damn journalists .

shown done up in again. And note taken, if journalists like me and Peter weren't hanging out on twitter and telling people about all of the outrageous stuff on the site, maybe there wouldn't be so much outrageous stuff.

I mean, it's really the place where you can get the most attention with twitter was so much easier to get at the people you wanted to harass because of the openness of the platform. And they also to get attention for harassing people by dragging journalists and and using dms and replies to make IT known that this was happening.

People who built twitter didn't really know what they were launching when they launched IT, but they all agree that IT should be a place where anyone could say anything. Now we've realised how tRicky, and maybe impossibly tRicky that notion can be.

We have to take the paradox of social media seriously, which, on the one hand, that does all of this connective work that brings us closer together with like minded individuals. But IT also does all this connective work that brings us together with like minded individuals on the far right, and extremely so.

Here was the kinda m. The users made twitter. Some made the decide delightful, others made IT miserable. And for the users who invested time and energy to turn the platform into their home, twitter wasn't something they could just abandoned.

There is so much to be lost within communities of feminist and women and people of color, online trans people, because social media, for so long before that, had been a place where they could reach out and find friends, they could join groups and builds resilience ency together. So the idea that you would just walk away from a tool because you're being serially harassed or tools for a lot of people wasn't an option because IT LED to further isolation .

by twenty fifteen. Twitter wasn't such bad shape that even the people running IT talking about how bad IT the users had created this platform. Now some of them were making IT unusable. And what was about the change was at the reality of twitter online was shaping our reality offline in ways we could never imagine.

The day of january six, I am told two things i'm supposed to do. One is to find a reason in a way to permanently suspend Donald trump. And two, to make the .

interaction stop. In our next episode, twitter tries to save itself from some of its users.

Audio clipsed from the tonight show Jimmy fallon, the today is show, good morning amErica and fox and friends and the giants the twitter fantasy is a production of box and the vox media podcast network. Special thanks to laun good for coasting this episode and for help reporting in producing IT A A. A lot of sui produce this episode.

Matt frasca a is our lead producer, Megan koane is our editor, charted silver is our fact checker brand, and mcfarland composed the shows theme. Matthew Billy engineer this episode, art chong is our show runner in a shot kwa as our executive producer. Peter copca, if you like, this episode has always please share IT and fall of the show in your podcast APP to get the next episode.

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