Yo Bitch
Twitter’s trust and safety group, responsible for safeguarding users, was run by Del Harvey, Twitter employee No. 25. [..] Her lack of traditional technical and policy experience made her a polarizing figure within the organization, although allies have found her passion about safety issues inspiring. In the early days, “she personally responded to individual [affected] users–Del worked tirelessly,” says Macgillivray. “[She] took on some of the most complex issues that Twitter faced. We didn’t get everything right, but Del’s leadership was very often a factor when we did.”
Harvey’s view, championed by Macgillivray and other executives, was that bad speech could ultimately be defeated with more speech, a belief that echoed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1927 landmark First Amendment decision that this remedy is always preferable to “enforced silence.” Harvey occasionally used as an example the phrase “Yo bitch,” which bad actors intend as invective, but others perceive as a sassy hello. Who was Twitter to decide? The marketplace of ideas would figure it out [..].
“I often hear people in Silicon Valley talking about fake news and disinformation as problems we can engineer our way out of,” says Brendan Nyhan, codirector of Bright Line Watch, a group that monitors threats to democratic processes. “That’s wrong. People are looking for a solution that doesn’t exist.”