Twitter Sucks, Says Twitter

Are you a person who writes words on the interwebs for fun and/or profit? Do you make jokes and do hashtags on The Twitters? If so, this SHOCKING! revelation from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is not going to SHOCK! you so much as make you go, "Uh yeah, DICK, we know."

We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've 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.

Go on. Say it. "Uh, yeah, DICK, we know."

See, on The Twitters, there are people who like to say terrible, rotten, awful, abusive, hateful, sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, poorly punctuated, and just straight-up dickish stuff. Stuff like "I hope you get raped." Stuff like "You should kill yourself." Stuff like "I know where you live, and I have guns, and I'm sick of being a gentleman so wink wink nudge nudge, WATCH OUT."

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Sometimes it is annoying. Sometimes it is tedious. Sometimes, if you are having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, it is that one last thing you really don't need to make you want to quit doing words on the internet.

And there's nothing you can do about it. You go through the 100-step process of filing a complaint with Twitter, and weeks later, Twitter responds with a, "Gosh, that's too bad, shrug, oh well, we'll look into this, maybe." By which time, that The Twitters troll has created eleventeen thousand new accounts for the purpose of saying all the same terrible words to you, and you have tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome from all the times you've muted and blocked and filed complaints, plus a hoarse throat from screaming, "LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU FUCKING FUCK!" at your computer screen (and no, that does not work, FYI).

Twitter's Dick feels bad about this, though. He is "ashamed." It is "absurd," he says, and also, "There's no excuse for it."

YA THINK?

Also, he accepts "full responsibility" for Twitter's complete failure to do anything about the non-stop harassment and threats so many of its users have to endure. Great. Next time you get trolled, just say, "Thanks a lot, DICK," because he knows it's his fault.

So, he's got a plan to deal with this problem, right? After all, it's not just an affront to whatever tiny shreds of human decency theoretically exist on the interwebs (what? why are you laughing?), it is, more importantly, hurting Twitter's bottom line. So here's the aggressive action Twitter is going to take:

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.

Sounds great. How ya gonna do that, Dick?

So now we're going to fix it, and I'm going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don't equivocate in our decisions and choices.

Oh. So, uh, he's sorry about that, it's totes his fault, and he's got his Top Men working on it. Top. Men.

Not that we haven't heard this sort of thing before. Like when Twitter was all, "Oh, sorry about all that horrible harassment and abuse, we're going to make it so much easier to deal with that," and then it rolled out some newfangled complaint form that was longer and worser and didn't fix anything at all whatsoever, so it was like, you know, #SorryNotSorry. Gee thanks, DICK, at least we know that was your fault.

So there's no actual plan, it seems, but Dick is really sorry, you can blame him for it, and please do not leave The Twitters and hurt the company's business anymore with your "not wanting to be stalked and harassed and threatened," because he is SORRY ABOUT THAT, OK? And they're going to get right on that ... one of these days.

[ The Verge ]