Dick Costolo: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, well, knock on all sorts of wood there. All right, David, now I'm going to take us into grading here. Rather than doing our normal grading thing of either looking at the big company acquiring a small company, which we sort of did already, thinking about what would have happened if they had bought Instagram or perhaps painting what A + C = F looks like in the future. I think it's actually more interesting on this episode to evaluate how Twitter has managed their impact of the platform on society. For a lot of you out there, this is going to be a squishier way of greeting. Dick, we wanted to ask you first, how would you rate Twitter's ability to manage the impact of the company and on the world? While I was CEO, I wish we had done a lot more and been a lot more aggressive. We did some stuff. We removed this, I guess you would call them trolls. He violated the sentiment of a number of our policies than any one specific policy. We removed his account for those reasons. I can't remember his last name, Chuck something. Wished we had been a lot more aggressive, so I give myself a C on that. I was the CEO of the company and despite pushback, could have said, I hear everybody's opinions, but we're going to do it anyway. I give myself a C. Since then, I think companies are really leading the charge in a number of ways and on a number of fronts around political ads. They were one of the first to say they weren't going to take certain political ads even when everyone else stood firm and not on moderating nonsense content or fake news or whatever you want to call it, misinformation. I think they've done an increasingly great job in the last little while. Companies are always going to come under fire for whether they do too much or do too little. I think they've done an increasingly great job on that front. I gave them an A over the course of the last year. It's interesting. Obviously, there's still much work to be done, but over the last year or two years, it does feel like Twitter is the only one that is even doing some of this work. Facebook, not so much.…

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