Last week, podcaster Joe Rogan and YouTube journalist Tim Pool sat down with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde, the tech giant’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety. What ensued was more than three-and-a-half hours of Rogan and Pool attempting to get to the bottom of a question everyone on the site’s been asking for a decade: What, what, what are you doing?
Rogan had recently interviewed Dorsey, but the conversation was widely panned for its failure to address some of the controversies surrounding Twitter. By bringing Pool and Gadde into the mix, Rogan was able to generate some more fireworks, addressing such issues as why people are being banned for tweeting the phrase “learn to code.”
To recap, the “learn to code” meme evolved after left-leaning and mainstream news outlets such as Huffington Post and BuzzFeed News announced devastating rounds of layoffs. Some conservatives mocked journalists in tweets, telling them to “learn to code,” which they saw (rightly or wrongly) as parallel to the media coverage and perceived derision of massive job losses in the manufacturing and coal sectors. Twitter came around to classifying the targeted harassment of journalists with the slogan as a violation of their terms of service. Overnight, thousands went into temporary Twitter jail for going after journalists.
Gadde finally explained the company’s policy on the matter:
Twitter is a private company, and they have every right to impose their own standards of conduct. But Twitter, it seems, has already abandoned this standard, now banning people for nothing more than using the phrase “learn to code.”
On Friday, frequent Washington Examiner contributor Tyler Grant criticized those carelessly flinging the meme at journalists, commenting that given the increasing automation of entry-level coding jobs, “lots of the ‘Learn to Code’ folks are going to look really, really stupid.”
Grant’s right, and that’s part of the reason why the phrase went from a legitimate insult to a meme overnight. Sure, coding is a marketable skill, but it won’t replace all the blue collar jobs being lost in the Rust Belt, nor will it replace the media.
But guess what, Twitter suspended Grant anyway, just for using the phrase! Similarly, the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross was suspended for using it in a purely joking fashion, as shown below.
It’s not an algorithm problem, because Twitter critics, including Pool, have been tweeting the phrase without punishment. If anything, Twitter’s flailing yet again, overcorrecting an issue and making the blowback even worse.
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who’s dealt with “doxing” on site, summed up Twitter’s problem in a single tweet.
I think the honest answer is Jack has no idea how to deal with actual toxic and abusive harassment on this platform so they just throw crap at all to see what sticks and this is the end result.
— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) March 11, 2019
To its credit, Twitter actually tries. Unlike Facebook, which lacks both transparency and harassment enforcement, Twitter makes legitimate efforts to explain itself and police illegal and abusive behavior without going overboard. Unfortunately, it fails badly, leaving tweets such as those “doxing” Kaczynski and his family remaining live on the platform while erroneously banning totally innocuous figures such as Jesse Kelly without any explanation.
Twitter will ultimately have to stop trying to control chaos fueled by their own nitpicking policies and go back to the basics, perhaps refocusing their efforts on “doxing” and, you know, literal terrorists using their site for illegal activity.
