In an interview with Rolling Stone published Wednesday, Dorsey was asked about the frequent calls to “get the Nazis off Twitter,” to which he initially offered the near-incomprehensible response, “[The topics of] abuse and our policies have been much more pronounced recently. And it comes in the form of categorizing people as Nazis and wanting them removed. People are definitely not satisfied with our progress there. It’s not as simple as what the reply would indicate, but it is work that needs to be done.” Then, after being informed that the site has not gotten rid of a number of “professed white nationalists,” despite supposedly having a policy whereby accounts aligning with such groups are suspended, Dorsey essentially blamed non-Nazi Twitter users for failing to do the company’s job, before praising the platform for all the progress’s apparently made:
A lot of the calls for “remove the Nazis” are also due to the fact our enforcement operates on reporting. A lot of people don’t report. They see things, but it’s easier to tweet out “get rid of the Nazis” than to report it. We need to be more proactive, but a lot of it has to do with the friction of everything relying on it being reported in the first place. Two years ago, you could only report it if you were the direct recipient of either a reply or a threat, or some abusive behavior. Whereas today, you can be a bystander and report it.
That was basically the same answer Dorsey gave Ringer founder Bill Simmons during another interview released Wednesday, when asked about the site’s problems with harassment in general. “I don’t think there’s going to be one single fix. I think it’s going to be a constant evolution,” he said. “I will say that we don’t feel great about the state that we’re in. Our entire harassment and abuse framework is dependent upon people reporting harassment and abuse, and it’s completely unfair that the victim of the abuse and harassment has to report it themselves.” Following the publication of both interviews, Twitter’s share price fell as much as 4 percent.
