Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Tuesday that online abuse has “no place on Twitter” and the tech firm is trying to improve safety on the social media website.
Dorsey’s remarks came about a week after comedian and actress Leslie Jones spoke out about the racist and hurtful comments she received on Twitter and signed off the site. The company responded by banning conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos from its site after he was accused of leading the online hate campaign against Jones.
Yiannopoulos later said in interviews that “Twitter has just died as a free speech platform,” raising questions about whether the company’s approach to freedom of expression has changed.
“We are not and never will be a platform that shows people only part of what’s happening or part of what’s being said,” Dorsey said in a conference call after the company reported its second-quarter earnings.
But the tech mogul also noted that the company wants to “elevate civil discourse” and abuse is not a part of that.
“Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment if they speak up,” Dorsey said. “No one deserves to be the target of abuse online and it has no place on Twitter. We haven’t been good enough at ensuring that’s the case and we must do better. It means building new technology solutions, making sure our policies and enforcement are consistent and educating people about both.”
Safety is one of the company’s priorities this year, but Twitter has also acknowledged that there’s more work to do when it comes to combating online abuse.
But it isn’t the only problem Twitter has to worry about. The company’s stock tumbled more than 11 percent on Tuesday in after-hours trading after it missed Wall Street’s expectations for revenue in the second quarter and posted a weak forecast for the third quarter.
Twitter now has about 313 million monthly active users.
Photo: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey speaks at a developer’s conference in San Francisco. (Courtesy Twitter)
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