The actual Tennessee Republican Party tried unsuccessfully for months to get Twitter to shut @TEN_GOP down.
”It was in no way affiliated with our office," Candice Dawkins, the real Tennessee Republican Party's communications director, told BuzzFeed News. ”It was very misleading."
On three separate occasions — Sept. 17, 2016, March 1, 2017, and Aug 14, 2017 — the Tennessee GOP reported the fake account to Twitter for impersonating it, according to email correspondence that Dawkins shared with BuzzFeed News.
Twitter is a problem.
Mike Montero had a post on Medium that does a great job of summing up my feelings:
I remember walking around the city on those days. Lotta hope. Feeling a bit cocky to be honest. But we thought we were gonna change the world.
Here's the bad news: we did.
Twitter was built at the tail end of that era. Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That's Twitter's original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we'd do with it.
Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn't realize the size of the bomb he's sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it's metaphorical. It's not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he's found himself responsible for.
The power of Oppenheimer-wide destruction is in the hands of entitled men-children, cuddled runts, who aim not to enhance human communication, but to build themselves a digital substitute for physical contact with members of the species who were unlike them. And it should scare you.
...And at some point, and I don't know exactly when or how or who — even scarier I don't know if the people involved know when or how or who — Twitter made the decision to ride the hate wave. With their investors demanding growth, and their leadership blind to the bomb they were sitting on, Twitter decided that the audience Trump was bringing them was more important than upholding their core principles, their ethics, and their own terms of service.
And that, whenever that day might have been, is the day Twitter died.
Twitter would have you believe that it's a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren't free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.
Biz Stone would also believe that Twitter is being objective in its principled stance. To which I'd ask how objective it is that it constantly moves the goal posts of permissibility for its cash cow of hate. Trump's tweets are the methane that powers the pretty hate machine. But they're also the fuel for the bomb Twitter doesn't yet, even now, realize it is sitting on. There's a hell of a difference between giving Robert Pattinson dating advice and threatening a nuclear power with war.
...Twitter today is a cesspool of hate. A plague of frogs. Ten years ago, a group of white dudes baked the DNA of the platform without thought to harassment or abuse. They built the platform with the best of intentions. I still believe this. But they were ignorant to their own blind spots. As we all are. This is the value of diverse teams by the way. When you're building a tool with a global reach (and who isn't these days) your team needs to look like the world it's trying to reach. And ten years later, the abuse has proven too much to fix.
... I've known plenty of people who've worked at Twitter over the years. Most have left by now. Usually out of frustration. And their stories aren't mine to tell, so I won't. But I'll tell you this: a lot of those people have tried, honestly tried to deal with the abuse on the platform. But when leadership doesn't want something fixed it's close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn't see something as a problem, it's not getting fixed at all.
And I'm sure that in the next few days Jack Dorsey will come out and make a pledge about how Twitter needs to be more transparent. He's very good at that. But when companies tell you they need to be more transparent it's generally because they've been caught being transparent. You accidentally saw behind the curtain. Twitter is behaving exactly as it's been designed to behave. Twitter, at this moment, is the sum of the choices it has made.
Even when the coop is covered in chickenshit, the chickens will come home to roost.
Twitter never saw Donald Trump as a problem, because they saw him as the solution.