Twitter Exec Explains Milo Being Banned | JRE Twitter Special

violations of our rules. And then you have people like Milo who is mean to a person and you delete you banned him permanently There's a little more to that. Actually Tim, let's talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about Milo and I actually brought the tweets because so let's let's preface that by saying the point I want to make sure is clear is that you had somebody who actively called for the death of people. I understand the context issue. Maybe he's talking about video games. Context and scale. And scale. So this is a verified user and that's just the complexity in acting. It's not an excuse for why we didn't do it in particular. Right. Right. And then there are a lot of other examples too that get into more egregious areas that I've prepared. So here we have someone with over 20,000 followers. He's verified numerous times incites his followers to commit a crime against these kids. The action taken against him is delete the tweets. You get a suspension. You get time out. Then you have people like Alex Jones who be rated a CNN reporter permanently banned. You get Milo Yiannopoulos. He was mean permanently banned. But that's your impression. That's not what happened. Okay. I'm here to talk about the details. Let's do this one at a time. Let's start with Milo. What was the details of Milo? So Milo had a number of tweets that violated our rules going back to 2014. But I'm going to talk about the final three in this three strike concept. He claimed to be a BuzzFeed reporter in his bio and he's a verified account. So that is impersonation. I'm not sure why he did that. He did do that. Well BuzzFeed's a left wing thing. So he was doing parody potentially. But our parody rules are very specific that if you have an account that's being is a parody account, you need to say that it is a parody account. So you don't confuse people. Everybody who knows Milo would know that he's not a BuzzFeed reporter. But people who don't know Milo will look at that verified account and say. But he wasn't verified after a while. You removed his verification. Because he violated our rules around verification. So the verification was removed because of the BuzzFeed thing? I believe so. I can confirm that. I believe so. He also docked someone. He posted private information about an individual. So that was the second one. He tweeted to somebody else. If you were my child, I'd have dashed your head on a rock and tried again, which we viewed as a threat. Really? That's I'm saying he's saying like your mom should have swallowed you. You know, it's like, you know, saying he's like you're a mistake. I don't think that's a threat. I understand why reasonable people would have different impressions of this. I'm just going through and telling you what they are just so we can have all the facts on the table and then we can debate them. And then the last one, we found a bunch of things that he posted that we viewed as incitement of abuse against Leslie Jones. So there's a bunch of them. But the one that I like to look at, which really convinced me is he posted two doctored tweets that were supposedly by Leslie Jones. They were fake tweets. The first one said white people are getting on my nerves. Like how can you call yourself human? And then the second one said the goddamn slur for a Jewish person at Sony ain't paid me yet. Damn, Bix nude better pay up. So this was just a fake tweet that someone had photoshopped. Two fake tweets. Two fake tweets. And we know they were faked because we could still tell from the software that they were faked. Is it can't always tell. So it is possible that he didn't know they were faked. It's possible someone sent it to him and he didn't do his due diligence and looking it up and it is possible. But it was pointed out to him that they were fake because he left it on. And not only did he leave it on, he said, don't tell me some mischievous Internet rascal made them up exclamation point. So this in the context of a bunch of other things he was saying towards Leslie Jones on Twitter. I and my team felt that this was taken as a whole incitement of harassment against her. Wasn't there another issue with multiple accounts that were connected to him? There were a bunch of other issues on the background, but these are the three primary things that we looked at in terms of the other things that were in the background. Weren't they multiple accounts that were connected to him? Like, I think that I'm not sure about that, Joe. I think it was more that we found him to be engaging in coordinated behavior and inciting people to to attack Leslie Jones. Now, with a case like him, no, I'm just going to be honest. I'm listening to those or listening to you read those tweets out. They don't sound that bad. And they certainly don't sound as bad as calling for the death of a child who's wearing a MAGA hat and throw him into a woodchop. Or the fact that that guy is still out there tweeting and yet Milo's not. Milo's initial, the whole thing stemmed from other than the BuzzFeed thing, stemmed from his legitimate criticism of a film. And he's, you know, he's a satirist. He was mocking this film. The doxing incident wasn't related to the film. The doxing incident? Well, why don't we? Why don't we? I hope we all agree that doxing is something that Twitter should take action on. 100 percent. Right. Yes. It threatened people in real life. And I take an enormous amount of responsibility for that because I fear daily for the things that are happening on the platform that are translating into the real world. So Milo is a contentious figure and there's certainly things you can pull up that I wouldn't agree with anything he did there. I think those are horrible. I think Joe brought some really good points. But what about Chuck Johnson? Why was Chuck Johnson banned? I don't have those details in front of me. Chuck Johnson said that he was preparing something to take out DeRay McKesson. And in a journalistic context, people take this to mean he was going to do a dossier or some kind of hit piece on DeRay. He was permanently banned. And my understanding, and it's been a long time since I've read this, there was some leaked emails, I think, from Dick Costolo, where he said, maybe it wasn't Dick. I don't want to drag Dick. I don't know who it was exactly. They said, I don't care. Just get rid of him. And he was off. So you have, and again, maybe there's some hidden context there. I don't know. But on the surface, we have. The concern is that this is always leaning towards the left. Oh, it absolutely is. And I'm not even getting started. Yeah. I can understand why you feel that way. I don't think that's true. I think we look at each individual instance of violations of our rules and try to make the best case that we can. And I'm not trying. And I do think, Joe, just to say, I do think we've failed in a couple of ways. And I want to admit that. Number one, we haven't done enough education about what our rules are because a lot of people violate our rules and they don't even know it. Like some of the statistics that we've looked at, like for a lot of first time users of the platform, if they violate the rule once, almost two thirds of them never violate the rules again. So we're not talking about like a bunch of people accidentally. Like if they know what the rules are, most people can avoid it. And most people, when they feel the sting of a violation, they go, okay, I don't want to lose my rights to post. Exactly. And they're able to do it. So we have a lot of work to do in education. So people really understand what the rules are in the first place. The other thing we have to do to address these allegations that we're doing this from a biased perspective is to be really clear about what types of behavior are caught by our rules and what types are not and to be transparent within the product. So when a particular tweet is found to be in violation of our rules, being very, very clear like this tweet was found to be in violation of this particular rule. And that's all work that we're doing. So we think the combination of education and transparency is really important, particularly for an open platform like Twitter. It's just part of who we are and we have to build it into the product. I appreciate that your particular thoughts though, on those examples that he described, when you're talking about someone saying they should throw these children into a wood chipper versus Chuck Johnson saying he should take this guy. He wants to prepare a dossier to take this guy out. Or how do you say it? He said something like, I'm going to take out DeRay McKesson with, he said, I'm preparing to take out DeRay, something like that. I can't remember. Preparing to take him out. I can understand how. So it could be misconstrued as he was trying to assassinate him. Right. You could misconstrued that. But not a direct threat. But the other one's a direct threat. One guy is banned for life. The other guy is still posting. And we can, I'm happy to follow up. I don't have all the Chuck Johnson. It's not about one thing, as I said. It's about a pattern in practice of violating our rules. And we don't want to kick someone off for one thing. But if there's a pattern in practice, like there was for Milo, we are going to have to take action at some point because we can't sit back and let people be abused and harassed and silenced on the platform.