Like many internet users, I love schadenfreude. And few things have
given me more pleasure to read than August’s Twitter whistleblower
story.
It’s a veritable feast of terrible things. The company allegedly has half its
longer supported by vendors. And the site has allegedly experienced one
security incident per week. Delicious!
As thrilling as that is, there are other parts of the story that are a lot less
entertaining. An internal report says in no uncertain terms that Twitter
is completely unequipped to cope with misinformation and
disinformation on its platform. That’s more than a little worrying,

“Interviewees described a largely reactive approach to misinformation,
disinformation, and spam in which action is taken on content and
This largely reactive approach created numerous policies in response to
a crisis, but as the report notes, “with no clear strategy for
The internal disconnection at Twitter seems to create situations where
the company either fails to recognize problems on the platform, or
Again, from the report:
“Interviewees described several instances in which Twitter was slow to
act on misinformation because teams did not see the topic or narrative

The process of identifying tweets that violate the company’s policies is
apparently quite onerous. The report claims an employee needs to use
labeled correctly as violating policies, it doesn’t actually stop the
behavior. The report references another document, not included, that
says Twitter’s systems for labeling tweets that violate its policies is
Stunningly, the report says that despite being ground zero of numerous
disinformation campaigns at a national scale since at least 2016, Twitter
has no way to track malicious campaigns and no central repository for
information the company accrues about bad actors.