The Twitter Fantasy from Land of the Giants 52:05

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.

Hi, everyone. Today, we've got a special show for you. We're going to play an episode of Land of the Giants, a Vox Media podcast. The show does reporting and immersive storytelling to shine a light on tech giants and how they became so damn big. Past seasons have tackled Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and now they're turning to, you guessed it, Twitter, or X, or whatever they want to call it these days. We thought it would be a nice chaser to our last episode with Ben Mesrick about his book, Breaking Twitter. In

In this episode of Land of the Giants, hosts Peter Kafka and Lauren Good take you on a walk down memory lane. It's a respite from the hellscape that is Elon's ex back to the Twitter dumpster fire that we all knew and could love. A trying if failing public square where vibrant communities flourished.

Even then, Twitter faced some problems, but it was a whole lot better than before Elon broke it. Or maybe it broke Elon. Who knows? Who cares? Anyway, this is a great episode, so listen to it. And if you like, search for Land of the Giants wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back on Thursday with a fresh episode of On with Kara Swisher. And no, it won't be about Elon. You're welcome. It is on.

Hey, a quick heads up. The second half of this episode contains descriptions of sexual harassment and graphic threats of violence. Exact time codes will be in the show notes. One of my friends was the first female engineer at Twitter in point of fact. And she reached out to me one day and she said, Hey, Del, we're starting to see occasional spam on Twitter. And when I think about bad things on the Internet, I think about you.

Del Harvey was Twitter's 25th employee. In 2008, she started as the head of Twitter's newly created spam and abuse team. She was also the only member of that team. Harvey already had plenty of experience cleaning up bad stuff on the internet. But some things on Twitter still managed to surprise her. For example, Brazilian teenage girls. I'm just going to tell you, they are one of the strongest forces on the planet.

There are a lot of them on Twitter, and they became such a headache for Harvey that she gave them an acronym, BTGs. And the reason Harvey was dealing with them is the BTGs were using Twitter to talk to celebrities. They were especially interested in one celebrity who joined the platform in March 2009. What's up, guys? This is Justin Bieber. If you guys aren't following me, follow me. Twitter.com slash Justin Bieber.

So every day, they would wake up and they would tweet, at Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil. At Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil. At Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil. Over and over again. We love you, Justin Bieber, come to Brazil is a totally fine thing to say on Twitter. Remember, Twitter's first use case was, I'm going to this bar.

The problem was the volume of people talking to Justin Bieber. They weren't intending to spam. They just really wanted Justin Bieber to come to Brazil. The problem BTG's created for Twitter is they made Twitter look like it was mostly a Justin Bieber fan site. If you looked at Twitter's list of trending topics, a rudimentary way to see what people were tweeting about on the site, it was dominated by those BTG mash notes.

But Twitter obviously wanted other people to use the platform too. So Del Harvey had to figure out a way to de-Bieber the whole thing. The first thing we did was like, you know what, let's make it so that if the tweets are exact duplicates, we'll count one towards a trend instead of all 10.

Cool. Done and dusted. But it takes more than a rule change to derail BTGs. They responded by tweaking each tweet just a bit. At Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil 1. At Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil 2. At Justin Bieber, we love you, come to Brazil 3. Now they're not duplicates anymore.

So Twitter responded again. This time it simply changed what trending meant. It tweaked its algorithm to consider the freshness of a topic, not just the sheer volume of tweets about it. So it would take a real spike in conversation for something to trend. And since BTGs were always tweeting about Justin Bieber, they fell out of the rankings. Problem solved. And there was a happy ending for the BTGs, too. I will say that Justin Bieber did go to Brazil. What's up, Sao Paulo?

And then they started tweeting at Justin Bieber, we love you, please come back to Brazil, which really felt like we were full circle on the whole thing. I'll lean on you for life.

Bieber spam was not a problem Del Harvey expected to discover at Twitter. But it turned out to be the kind of thing she dealt with all the time. She'd look at weird stuff people did on Twitter and had to figure out if it was okay. You know, a lot of what my job really was, and a good 25% of it, at least in the beginning, was just staring at what people were doing and trying to figure out what they were doing and if it was problematic.

And if we should stop them, or help them, or tell them what they're doing is having a negative consequence, or leave it alone entirely. Del Harvey and Twitter ended up dealing with much, much more complicated problems than excited Justin Bieber fans. But even as Twitter grew, it never outgrew this core conundrum. Who runs this place? The company? Or its users? ♪

I'm Peter Kafka. This is Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy. Twitter is a big and complicated place. And so for this episode, I wanted help exploring it. So I'm turning to my pal, Lauren Good. I've known her forever. Didn't just age you out, did I, Lauren? She's a senior writer and podcaster at Wired.

Hey, Lauren. Hey, Peter. Thanks for having me be a part of this. Lauren, you've been on Twitter forever. You have tried all the things. You use all the things. It's part of your job to use all the things. What's so unique about Twitter? Well, as a journalist, I found Twitter really valuable for a long time because of the way it, I don't know, was a portal to what was going on in the world. I used it to connect with sources, to

slide into people's DMs, that sort of thing. That's one example, but that's exactly what's unique about Twitter is that it could be anything for anyone. I mean, yes, you were broadcasting things to the world, but it could also be your own little space on the internet where you found community.

I think for people who cover tech like us, it's particularly interesting because we're used to the story of the tech dude in a garage or the Stanford dorm room making the thing. And with Twitter, that wasn't necessarily the case, right? It was the people who were using it who started to do kind of weird things on there. And that made Twitter into what it is.

Yeah, the guys who built Twitter didn't know what they wanted Twitter to be, and the user stepped in and said, here's what it's going to be. And then they said that a hundred and a thousand, a million different times because they created a million different versions of Twitter. Right. And that's, I think, the uniqueness of Twitter. But it's also its liability. So that's what our episode is about today, that push and pull between platform and people and how those people made Twitter the best and worst place on the Internet.

One of the intoxicating things about Twitter is just how open it is. You didn't have to be invited to the party to join the conversation. You could show up to any party. It sort of was this internet open mic. It was this democratized space where you could sort of type into the void. In 2011, Bess Kalb had a day job in journalism.

But it turned out what she really liked was typing jokes into the Twitter void. Something about Twitter felt like a literal open mic night, but with even lower stakes.

It was this sort of like everyone got the same prompt every day, which was like the news or the human condition. And then right into this space with a sentence and a half, your funniest take. What kind of funny things were you writing on Twitter at the beginning? I remember one that got me disinvited from a potluck. It was so sad and beautiful that my generation will extinguish itself with homemade community garden jam botulism.

My lovely friend, who is still a friend, made a lot of jam at the time and she took it personally. And so she said, because of your tweet, please don't come to my potluck? You know, it was one of those things where like that week I didn't get the invitation. I was like, I know why. This was back in Twitter's early days when users were actively trying to figure out just what they could do with the service. One of those things was follow Fridays when users would highlight other accounts they thought were cool or useful or whatever with the idea that you'd want to follow them too.

One Friday, Kalb got a boost from an actual comedian, Rob Delaney. He wrote, super funny person alert, and then had my handle. And then that instant, my Twitter blew up. And I went from having 150 followers to something like 1,100 followers overnight. I called my mom and she was like, oh my God, how much money does this mean? And

And I was like, zero dollars. Oh, I got news for you. Yeah, she's like, great, you have another two years on our health care.

Normally, Twitter fame doesn't give you anything but more Twitter fame. But in this case, it actually did lead to something. Nell Scovel, a writer for David Letterman and The Simpsons and a million other shows, reached out on Twitter. She DMed me and was like, hey, I just read through your archive and you should come to L.A. and sleep on my couch. And I want to introduce you to some people. And I wrote back, okay.

Oh, so flattering. Thank you so much. Take care. All the best. But Scoville was persistent and Kalb flew to L.A. About a year later, she landed a job writing for Jimmy Kimmel. She's still making TV today. So Bess Kalb made out pretty well on Twitter. How'd it go for you, Lauren? Well, I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that I did participate in Follow Fridays in the early days, so I'm glad you gave that a shout out. But unfortunately, I'm still waiting for my TV writing deal from Jimmy Kimmel.

But that was the whole vibe on Twitter back in the early 2010s, right? It was fun, it was chaotic, but it was also maybe professionally useful. And it was so easy to meet interesting strangers, or better yet, to find yourself in a Twitter corner with strangers who were into the same things that you were.

Take Anna Gifty Opoku Ajiman, who in 2017 was studying math in college. One of my mentors, actually the first Black woman I had ever met who had, you know, been an economist, basically encouraged me to join something called Econ Twitter. I went on Twitter specifically to learn more about, like,

is considered an economist because when I first entered economics I googled economics and then a bunch of pictures showed up and none of those individuals look like me a lot of them were white guys older white guys they all went to Harvard Yale or Princeton and so I think for me I was like you know if there's this community that exists of economists that look more like the communities that I'm a part of I really want to engage with that so it's like learning from those individuals in real time

It seems pretty obvious to say now, but Twitter was about conversations, not comments. On Facebook, you would leave a comment on a friend's post. But on Twitter, ideally, you were in a back and forth. Apoku Adjiman thinks that this has changed the entire discipline of economics. Twitter has become a little bit like a virtual seminar, except everybody can see the exchange happening in real time, right? And anybody can weigh in.

Before Twitter, everyone knew who Paul Krugman was, but most economists weren't micro-celebrities. Now it was possible to make a name for yourself by sharing your ideas on Twitter. Econ Twitter, in my opinion, has flattened economics. You have people who would never engage with somebody because they feel like they're in the top department or whatever, sliding each other's DMs, right? I just inserted myself.

inserted myself into different conversations that I thought were interesting. And I didn't expect these people to respond. They did. I slid into Chelsea Clinton's DMs and now she's my mentor.

So here's something crucial about Twitter. It's a network of networks, all running at the same time without any prompting from the people who actually run the platform. But Twitter users weren't just creating their own spaces. They also created actual features they wish Twitter had. You might say Twitter had millions of people working on the product for free. I think it's an important part of the brand. Here's Jason Goldman, Twitter's first actual product boss.

I think that the idea that the product was so simple and allowed for so much play that users were unable to kind of push the boundaries of what the platform would be becomes a really important part of the story, where even though the product was failing, from a technical perspective, people felt very attached to it. And without that, we would have been in a lot of trouble. Which is how we get to the hashtag. Hey, Justin, what's up? Not much, Jimmy. Hashtag chillin'. What's up with you?

It's been busy working. Hashtag rise and grind. Hashtag is it Friday yet? By 2013, hashtags were ubiquitous enough to get spoofed by Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake on national TV. Now they're pretty passe for most people.

Except over on TikTok, which is weird. But early in Twitter's life, they were a crucial, if confusing, part of the company's architecture, even though they weren't created by Jason Goldman and crew. I almost think that I was a latecomer to Twitter, even though I was the 1,168th user. Chris Messina worked in tech in San Francisco, and he was one of those guys who didn't just work in tech, he loved tech. He was a self-described product therapist. He did not fall in love with Twitter at first sight.

If you think about Twitter back then, it was mostly just a message fan out service, meaning that you post a message to this relay and then it sends a message out to anyone who's like listening. That's all it did. There were no trending topics. There wasn't like an explore tab. There wasn't even search. I mean, Twitter was so primitive. It was so basic.

But that also meant Messina felt he had an open invitation to make Twitter better, even though he didn't work there. We had to invent and then, you know, cajole Twitter into adopting some of these formats and ideas. And if they weren't going to do it, we were going to have to do it for ourselves.

Messina's bio says he invented the hashtag, but that's not strictly true. In some corners of the internet, people were already using a pound sign to classify keywords in a string of characters. And on Flickr, the early photo-sharing site, people used hashtags to help describe their photos, which made the site searchable and more social. On Twitter, you could use a hashtag, but it didn't really do anything.

Messina thought that Twitter should make hashtags linkable. So when you click on #JimmyFallon, you find all the other tweets from people talking about Jimmy Fallon. Back in the beginning of the second internet boom, you didn't really need an invitation to pitch Twitter on something. If you had the audacity, you could just show up at the offices and start talking, like Messina did in 2007.

I wrote this proposal, I actually made mock-ups, and then I took the idea basically right into Twitter's headquarters in South Park. I kind of walked in the front door because there was no security, the door was like wide open.

The problem with this approach is that Twitter's leaders did not want what Messina was selling. Look, I will say I hate hashtags. Jason Goldman again. I think part of our bias against them was this is like web one shit. However, I was also against tweet as like a noun. So like, you know, maybe my taste is just terrible.

Chris Messina is still maybe a little bit stung about being brushed off. I just remember the rejection was just so kind of curt. Just, this is too nerdy. It's never going to work. You know, the people who made decisions about the future of Twitter were not interested in what I had to offer at that time.

But eventually, Messina and the users, or maybe reality, won. Twitter realized at some point that linkable hashtags did make the site easier to navigate. And also, they could sell sponsored hashtags as an ad product. Revenue. So, in the end, Twitter got behind the hashtag. But it was the users who figured out what could really make them special.

When I was on Twitter at 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night, what I was seeing was very different than the news-based conversations that I was having during the day. Meredith Clark is a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. She was also an early Twitter user, so she saw some of the earliest hashtags.

A lot of things at that time had the hashtag After Dark on them. And After Dark signals to people that, you know, this is sort of like HBO after 8 o'clock. It's not going to be PG-13. We're going to get into rated R territory. We're going to get into rated X territory. The we here is important. In theory, it could be anyone on After Dark. In reality, Clark was connecting with a specific set of Twitter users.

And that is how Black Twitter became apparent to me, that there were people who were using this platform in completely different ways than I think it had been conceived even by its creators. She had tapped into Black Twitter, Twitter's best-known homegrown space. For me, 2009 was the year that everything started really coming together for Black Twitter. Jason Parham writes about Black internet culture. He wrote an oral history of Black Twitter for Wired.

You have the death of Michael Jackson, and this is the first time we're really seeing Black folks coming together, grieving for this person who in some ways felt like a family member to them. A few days later, you have the BET Awards, and then later that year, you have the hashtag that sort of threads everything together. You know you're Black when...

Ashley Weatherspoon is an entrepreneur in New York City. In 2009, she was working with singer and former Disney star Adrienne Bailon-Houghton. Weatherspoon was trying to drum up hashtags that would help connect Bailon-Houghton to her fans. It was raining and there was a girl walking outside and she threw a plastic bag over her head. And I turned to Adrienne and I was like, you know you black win, girl.

And she started dying laughing. Later that day, I got on the train and I saw another moment that just was like, there's my Black folks again, just being us. Right? I got off the train and I threw the hashtag up and it started going crazy. She was like, you know you're Black when you cancel your plans when it's raining outside. Right?

And within a few hours, it just, it's volcanic. We hadn't seen Black folks really corral together around a specific hashtag. You know you're Black when you get the itis after eating a hearty meal. You know you're Black when you show up during puberty and your aunt's talking about your bee stings.

You have people piling on top of the original tweet. "You know you're Black when you used to have 20-inch rims." Just people sharing experiences that feel powerful to them on the platform around this hashtag. For me, it was another day playing with the hashtag. What it meant to other Black people, though, across Twitter was that there was a space for us. A space for us to laugh at ourselves, a space for us to unite.

People weren't code-switching in this space. We were using words, phrases, and hashtags that had significant cultural meaning within Black communities. So it wasn't just happening in a barbershop or in a beauty salon or in a traditionally or historically Black space. It was happening on the internet where anyone could see what those conversations were like. Meredith Clark again. Something else that made that frankness possible was the platform's anonymity.

On Twitter, your account didn't have to be connected to your real identity. You could use whatever name you wanted. And for some people, that meant they could be more authentic. So I was using it professionally, but then I also had a burner account so that I could have fun without, you know, damage or risk to my job. Have you ever shared that burner account name? Absolutely not. That's in the vault. Yes. Black Twitter could be all kinds of things.

It was also one thing in particular. Black Twitter is funny because Black people, particularly in the United States, often use humor as a coping mechanism for the things that we experience. So everything from everyday racism to really traumatic incidents.

I can even go back to one of the best days within Black Twitter was the day that Yahoo News published this story. The headline was, Trump wants a bigger Navy, but someone accidentally hit the N key instead of the B key.

And so it said, Trump wants an N-word Navy. And Black Twitter took that idea of, you know, what a Black Navy would look like, even using this pejorative, and just had an absolute field day making fun of

of what that might be like. And that is a reflection of what it's like to use humor to cope with the use of painful epithets, even when they are accidental, with the reality of being Black in this society. I think what Black Twitter does so well is this idea of signifying and being able to remix an idea and shift the meaning of it just a little bit. Jason Parham again.

So Black life for so long has been devalued in the media as we've been told that it's this one thing. And so Twitter gave us the chance to shift that, to radically alter that perception and saying, hey, look what's actually happening or look what's happening in our communities.

Over the years, Black Twitter became a force of its own. Even if you'd never heard of it, you bounced into it — on the platform and in real life. Black Twitter created culture. And that was power that any user could tap into.

Like Tykee James. James is an avid birder who often found himself on bird Twitter, which, as you can probably guess, was a place for people who liked tweeting about birds. But in 2020, the conversations James had online, and especially on Twitter, changed. We're reflecting on the news of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery was lynched while jogging through a suburb in Georgia.

This was close to home for James. A lot of people go birding in the same way that he would just go jogging in some neighborhood or near a neighborhood. It could have happened to any one of them. Then James saw a video of Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher in New York, being harassed in a park. The video blew up on Twitter and then on national TV. New details this morning of a Central Park confrontation gone viral.

Please don't come close to me. Sir, I'm asking you to stop recording me. Please don't come close to me. A white woman calling the police after a black man says he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Please call the cops.

I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life. Please tell them whatever you like. There is an African-American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me threatening myself and my dog. I'm sorry, I can't hear you either. I'm being threatened by a man in the ramble. Please send the cops immediately.

The story of the Cooper incident, how it was told, we realized there's so much attention of the racial dynamics of this country. And so many of them are focused on trauma. It is true. The Black experience has trauma because of what this country is.

However, the Black experience goes beyond trauma. The Black experience includes joy, pride, resistance, strength, and style. And what can we do to celebrate that and to center that in a way that we all really need it right now? Hashtag Black Birders Week.

The hashtag caught on. Thousands of people started tweeting about their own experiences about being Black and being outside. I had a friend of mine give me the data set for Black Birders Week for, I think it was the week and a couple days after. Over 300 million impressions on that hashtag. To show that there was that much attention, that much appetite, that much celebration...

James doesn't think that Black Birders Week could have happened on any other platform. Twitter was public. Twitter is the most public forum for someone to post a video, make a tweet, share a hashtag that anybody else can just tap, click, and then get into. So Twitter users helped turn Twitter into a powerful place. But who got to use that power? And how did they use it? That's after the break.

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So here's a pattern. Twitter users start doing something on their own because it makes sense to them. Then eventually, Twitter's leadership turns those behaviors into features. The hashtag was one example. There are other, even more primitive ones. Like at first, the retweet was a user hack. When people wanted to share someone else's tweet, they would copy and paste the original tweet, and then they would type the letters RT in front of that.

And it was the same thing with the at mention. At one point, if you wanted everyone in your Twitter timeline to see what you were saying to another person, you had to put a period in front of the at symbol and then the person's handle.

These hacks were just that, hacks. And only a subset of diehards even understood how they worked. Until Twitter integrated them both into the platform. Which is cool, but new features come with new problems. You know, it's the starry-eyed visionary, right? Like, these guys created something that they thought would be fun, and then it took off.

They were focused on the building and the creating and all the cool things that come along with that. Del Harvey again. And it also meant that I, at that point, would usually be entering much like Debbie Downer with the wah, wah. So guys, here's a thing I was thinking about.

Harvey was the one who had to deal with the unintended consequences, like the retweet. Retweeting was when quote tweet came about, right? Because then it became the dunk on approach. Yeah, let me add my commentary. Yeah. And then shoot it out to my followers, who might be a very different audience than the original tweet was intended for. You can see where things can go awry. So while it's great to listen to your users, it's also complicated.

Which users do you listen to?

Michael Sippe, who was Twitter's VP of product back in 2013, was grappling with this when users started complaining about a fundamental part of the site, the block function. Block allowed you to cut someone off from seeing or interacting with your tweets. The thing is, if you blocked someone, they could find out. We were hearing about this from folks with very large followings that were like, hey, what's happening is like I try to block somebody and they're

Other people will come and essentially attack me. Some users, like celebrities, wanted a more polite way to filter certain people out of their feeds. So Zippy thought, okay, why not replace the block button with mute? Here's Del Harvey again. So just mute, right? Like, shh, shh, shh. You're not blocked. You can still follow me and see all my content, but I don't have to see all of your content.

You can read my tweets, you can respond, but I will never see anything and you will never know. Which is exactly what the people complaining to Sippy wanted. So we shipped that and it was a mistake. They rolled out the launch and immediately people started absolutely losing it. That's because a whole bunch of other people relied on Twitter's block function.

Specifically, they relied on having control over who could see what they wrote. Maybe, for instance, they were blocking a troll and it just felt safer to know that troll couldn't monitor their tweets. We had a lot of feedback from the community that like changing a block into a mute essentially removes the agency of the person that's actually doing the blocking. And it was very it was really upsetting. And I and like I actually I really regret that decision.

MuteGate only lasted a day. There was, after all, a simple solution. Keep both. You can block or you can mute. But the fact that this all got so complicated and that it got emotional, even, for some people, is a testament to how messy it can be for a platform to follow the user's lead. Sometimes even the most well-meaning users will disagree on what they need.

So what happens when Twitter is caught in a push and pull with users who are not so well-meaning? People who don't want to make Twitter better. People who want to make it worse. I think if you have a couple hundred million people on the internet in one location, it doesn't take a lot of people to actually make it bad for everybody else. Raelle Inasa Crockett is an artist and writer.

Normally, their timeline was full of tweets about Black radical thought, feminist theory, and, of course, scandal hot takes. But when Crockett logged on in the spring of 2014, they noticed something off. I'm seeing tweets saying things like, oh, well, if you celebrate fathers, then you're upholding the patriarchy because fathers are the patriarchy. One of them compared Father's Day to sexual assaults. So it's just ridiculous, just completely, like, just bonkers.

Crockett noticed the hashtag #EndFather'sDay everywhere. It was the kind of preposterous "get a load of this" idea that people couldn't help but share on Twitter. And it migrated the way wild stuff on Twitter often migrates from there to the rest of the world. And some outlets, like Fox News, took the idea at face value.

Well, it started out as a joke, but the hashtag End Father's Day is picking up steam with feminists online and with others in social media. They're not just interested in ending Father's Day. They're interested in ending men. That's really what they want. Crockett wasn't new to the Internet. When something smelled off, they knew where to look. Straight to 4chan, the anything-goes message board beloved by trolls and other creeps.

Sure enough, Crockett found them there ginning up a hoax. Their idea was that we're going to create these plausible women of color, feminists of color, and we're going to make these avatars just say the most unhinged things, just the most ridiculous things. You know, the idea is to poison the water so that these type of women would not be taken seriously.

It was pretty easy to unearth a fake Father's Day tweeter. You could tell it was AstroTurf because we didn't know who these accounts were. Like, we'd never seen these accounts before. The trolls didn't use their real names, of course, but you could sniff that out.

Crockett and others responded. They would retweet and tag the fakers with their own hashtag, your slip is showing, and encourage their followers to block the trolls. And then the trolls responded to Crockett's response. They regrouped and then was just like, all right, we'll take what we learned from this, using far-right web spaces to organize, and then amplifying the harassment by creating numerous accounts.

to turn up the volume and like overwhelm their targets. There are moments where certain events give you a preview of the future. They show you what's possible.

Joan Donovan is a professor at Boston University who specializes in online misinformation and disinformation. When it comes to social media, we didn't really know what was going to happen, especially the difference between what happens when one person's doing something and what happens when thousands of people are doing something.

Donovan says that End Father's Day was a key moment, a moment that crystallized a certain kind of trolling behavior. It set a playbook. Make fake accounts to use in a targeted campaign, use that campaign to capture more attention, and then repeat. Later that year, 2014, the trolls took the lessons from End Father's Day and supersized them.

I'd certainly gotten threats on the internet before, but you've got to understand this was a deluge of them beyond what anyone's brain could process.

Brianna Wu is a video game developer. She got into the industry because she loves games, and she wanted more people to love games. I'm a child of the 80s and 90s. I've always felt that this was really true when I was a kid, that we always shipped games when men got to be the hero and women were always, you know, the reward or the girlfriend or, you know, just the thing you were searching for. ♪

It happened with Super Mario Brothers in 1985. So I really just wanted to build games where someone else got to be the star. Wu ran her own game development studio. She was also in online conversations about the game industry chauvinism, the stuff that happened both on screen and behind the scenes.

And that enraged a certain part of the internet. We really awakened this right-wing reactionary force online that pursued us and tried to silence us. In 2014, Wu became the target of one of the most coordinated and overwhelming online harassment campaigns in the history of the internet. The men who came after Wu and other women used the hashtag GamerGate.

Just like End Father's Day, they wanted to undermine the genuine conversation women were having about misogyny in the industry.

On message boards outside of Twitter, trolls plotted how to take down the women speaking up. They pretended to be upset about quote-unquote ethics in video game journalism. But this was basically as bogus as End Father's Day. Gamergate was so powerful that it became shorthand for how a very small group can organize and harass people online.

Wu's first instinct was to ignore it, which was the standard advice for dealing with online bullies. Don't feed the trolls, kind of keep your head down, don't say the wrong thing, and don't get drawn into public fights, right? I thought about it, and I really asked myself if...

I would be able to live with myself five, ten years down the line if I just sat down and did nothing in a time where women were being run out of the game industry right and left. And I realized I would regret it if I didn't. So I came back online and I said, guess what, Gamergate? I'm not going anywhere. Wu sent out a series of tweets mocking the trolls.

The trolls escalated. This account comes back and says, guess what, bitch? I know where you live. Your dead, mutilated corpse is going to be on the front page of Jezebel tonight. I'm going to cut off your husband's Asian penis and rape you with it until you bleed. If you have any children, they're going to die too. You did nothing worthwhile with your life and a whole bunch of other horror.

You know, hundreds of people a day are telling me they're about to come murder me. I've got, you know, men in a skull mask holding a knife up to the camera and explaining how they're going to stick it through my throat on video. I mean, there's no other word for it but traumatizing. People have been behaving badly on the internet since dial-up modems. But Twitter is where and how Brianna Wu was harassed. The trolls used Twitter's features to supercharge their campaign.

Hashtags helped them coordinate their efforts. Retweets gave thousands of people access to her private information, like her home address. Twitter's embrace of anonymity let the trolls operate without worrying about repercussions.

When Wu got in touch with Twitter, Del Harvey was no longer working on her own. She now had a team who could help Wu deal with the worst of the attacks. Twitter gave me resources on the Twitter trust and safety team where I could send a death threat and have it taken more seriously than, you know, just someone without that contact. The Twitter trust and safety team was trying to counteract the next moves of the mob.

But the mob moved fast, changing their tactics. Gamergate figured out a way to write bots that every time I would tweet something, no matter what, it would link a bunch of, like, hateful disinformation right underneath it in an image link, and it would also spam that to anyone who replied to me. Twitter tried to catch up, with Wu's help.

Eventually, it moved into helping them develop policies around how to suspend accounts and send multiple death threats. It was this real, almost unpaid engineering advisory role that I took on with Twitter, just trying to help them understand what was going on at a technical level and make a better product. Going back to that time period, how did this whole experience change the way you use social media?

I think there's a short-term answer that it really damaged me in a very public way. And I think there's a later answer that it kind of took a certain degree of my humanity away from me. The reality is that kind of abuse, you don't come back from it. You just, you change.

And nowadays, when someone sends me a rape threat, I will look at it and I sit there and I go, I know I should be feeling something. I know I should be feeling scared, angry, pissed off, afraid. I know I should feel something. And I just, I feel numb inside.

And I know I'm so much more cynical today than I was during GamerKate. And I really regret losing those parts of myself.

Even embedded in that question, how did you change the way you use social media, really puts the onus on you. Whereas the platforms should have changed, ideally society would have evolved, but instead it's really still on you, the person who was harassed. You know, I really believe if you build a community and a product, you have a responsibility to make it safe for people to use it. But that's just not the culture we have.

Brianna Wu grew up loving video games, and she no longer makes them. In some ways, the trolls won. Wu didn't leave the internet entirely. She's still on Twitter. And after an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2018, she turned her attention to helping progressive politicians with their online strategies.

Gamergate helped solidify bad behavior as part of the Twitter brand. So much so that in 2015, Twitter CEO Dick Costola did something other social media bosses never did. He owned up to it.

In a company-wide memo, Costola wrote, We suck at dealing with abuse, and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret, and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

Remember, even when Twitter was growing fast, it was still a tiny platform compared to Facebook. And eventually Twitter stopped growing fast. And that meant it had to work harder to find and keep new users. Being known as a toxic health site didn't help.

You know, we were seeing abuse on the platform. And I think that, you know, I can just look back and say we didn't invest enough. That's Michael Sippy again, who ran product under Costolo. We had a fantastic trust and safety team, but they were perennially understaffed, which again is partly on me and partly on the rest of the executive team.

But it's possible Twitter could have never spent its way out of this problem. Jason Goldman thinks one reason Twitter was slow to react to some of these issues had to do with who was running Twitter. The executive team at both Twitter and most of the other social media companies is predominantly white dudes. And like, you just experience a different level of online interaction than literally any other group of people in the world. Like whether you're a woman or you're black or you're a non-English speaker, and you're

And we were just kind of blind to that. But Goldman also thinks that Twitter, along with every other social media company, was just too slow to realize just how much work it would have to do to manage the way users used and abused the platform. That moderation isn't an afterthought. It's the business.

For too long, the industry, and I put myself in this category, thought of content moderation as like fixing bugs. Like, oh, like people will abuse the system and we'll just like kind of patch it as we go along. It's like, no, no, no, no. These aren't bugs that you need to fix. This is like the feature. This is like what you are actually providing to the world is a better experience for the type of content that is being seen. Del Harvey says senior leadership wasn't really interested in abuse unless it ended up in news stories.

Then they'd ask her, how did this happen? And then you explain and then they're like, oh, yeah, we'll get you some more engineers. And then the engineers don't come. And then you have the conversation again the next time. Harvey understands why her team didn't get the resources she needed. But that's different than feeling good about it. You know, the starry-eyed visionaries wanted all of those things that I wanted to support in trust and safety.

And the challenge was that when you're looking at the short term and your options are spend this quarter building a new user-facing cool feature or spend this quarter building internal infrastructure and tooling that will make your ability to respond to X tickets much more robust, the user-facing feature tends to win and not so much the internal tools.

Those trade-offs and tensions Harvey is talking about, and the blind spots Goldman is talking about, exist everywhere, at every internet company. But there's something else going on with Twitter. What is unique about Twitter's ability to amplify ideas that just made it so different from other platforms? It's all the damn journalists. Joan Donovan again, and note taken.

If journalists like me and Peter weren't hanging out on Twitter and telling people about all of the outrageous stuff on the site, maybe there wouldn't be so much outrageous stuff. I mean, it's really the place where you can get the most attention.

With Twitter, it was so much easier to get at the people you wanted to harass because of the openness of the platform. And then also to get attention for harassing people by dragging in journalists and using DMs and replies to make it known that this was happening. The people who built Twitter didn't really know what they were launching when they launched it.

But they all agreed that it should be a place where anyone could say anything.

Now we've realized how tricky, and maybe impossibly tricky, that notion can be. We have to take the paradox of social media seriously, which on the one hand, it does all of this connective work that brings us closer together with like-minded individuals, but it also does all this connective work that brings us together with like-minded individuals on the far right and extremists. So here was the conundrum. The users made Twitter.

Some made the site delightful, others made it miserable. And for the users who invested time and energy to turn the platform into their home,

Twitter wasn't something they could just abandon. There was so much to be lost within communities of feminists and women, people of color online, trans people, because social media for so long before that had been a place where they could reach out and find friends. They could join groups and build resiliency together.

So the idea that you would just walk away from a tool because you're being serially harassed or trolled for a lot of people wasn't an option because it led to further isolation. By 2015, Twitter was in such bad shape that even the people running it were talking about how bad it was. The users had created this platform and now some of them were making it unusable.

And what was about to change was that the reality of Twitter online was shaping our reality offline in ways we could never imagine. The day of January 6th, I am told two things that I am supposed to do. One is to find a reason and a way to permanently suspend Donald Trump. And two, to make the insurrection stop. In our next episode, Twitter tries to save itself from some of its users. ♪

Audio clips from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and Fox & Friends. Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy, is a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Special thanks to Lauren Good for co-hosting this episode and for her help reporting and producing it.

Oluwakemi Oladasui produced this episode. Matt Frasica is our lead producer. Megan Cunane is our editor. Charlotte Silver is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme. Matthew Billy engineered this episode. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Peter Kafka. If you like this episode, as always, please share it and follow the show in your podcast app to get the next episode.