Journalist James Foley, of Rochester, N.H., is seen in Boston, in a Friday, May 27, 2011 file photo. Steven Senne/AP
Twitter plans to suspend any accounts spreading graphic imagery from a video that appears to show photojournalist James Foley being beheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Company CEO Dick Costolo made the announcement early Wednesday morning on his own Twitter feed, after a video of the alleged beheading emerged Tuesday on YouTube.
It’s an important step for Twitter, signifying that the company—which has recently been dogged by complaints of abuse and other graphic content on the platform—may finally be ready to do something about it. During Twitter’s most recent earnings call, the company asked users to Tweet questions to the Costolo using the hashtag #askcostolo, only to be bombarded with questions about how Twitter planned to respond to reports of harassment on the site. At the time, the questions seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now, however, it seems Costolo and his team are ready to listen.
This is the second announcement of its kind this week for Twitter. One Tuesday, the company announced that it would delete images of the deceased, upon request from family members. That policy change was a clear response to news that Zelda Williams, daughter of actor Robin Williams, left Twitter after trolls flooded her feed with abusive messages about her father. At the time, Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, said: “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter,” noting that the company was “in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one.”
Now, those very policies seem to be taking shape. The questions is: How well can Twitter truly adhere to them? With 500 million Tweets sent per day, staying on top of every report of abuse will take sophisticated monitoring technology and a large staff of human monitors. Twitter will have to figure out a way to remove this content not in days or weeks, not even hours, but within minutes of it being posted.
But the most troublesome part of all this is the fact that for every Tweet that’s removed, another can easily take its place. As The Guardian recently pointed out, without the proper systems in place, the whole thing is bound to devolve into an internet-wide game of “whack-a-mole.”
And then there’s the fact that Twitter has, for so long, thrived precisely because of all the freedoms it allows its users. As critical as it is for Twitter to strengthen its privacy policies and block content that threatens the safety and well-being of its users, the company will have to do so while still honoring its role as a major purveyor of news around the world.
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