Report: Twitter Secretly Censored Criticism of Obama
11th August 2016
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
According to Buzzfeed News, citing a company insider, then-CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered Twitter employees to filter out abusive replies to the president during his May 2015 #AskPOTUS digital town hall. The company did so both by creating an algorithm to automatically filter out abuse and by manually removing certain tweets that slipped through.
Buzzfeed’s report is based on multiple inside sources, one of whom said that many senior employees were kept in the dark about the censorship in fear they would strongly object.