Following a report recently released by Buzzfeed, “A Honeypot For Assholes: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment,” which details Twitter Inc.’s decade-long struggle to fend off trolls on its white-man-managed platform, the company has responded saying the report is inaccurate.

A statement by Twitter said, “We feel there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair portrayals,” expressing that, rather than debate with Buzzfeed on the matter, it was going to concentrate on the issue of safety. BuzzFeed’s managing editor, John Paczkowski, said Twitter had been contacted prior to the release of the story but declined to comment.

The report, according to Buzzfeed, consisted of interviews with former (unnamed) Twitter employees. The gist was that Twitter’s highest ranks can’t agree on matters of abuse, that safety policies are not clearly defined, and that there is intense “pressure over user growth”. It also states tweets aimed at Barack Obama were censored for abusive language.

A poignant piece of the report is an interview with an alleged former employee who says that certain high-ranking personnel were extreme in their intent to keep Twitter “radically” free. Apparently, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo argued against this unfettered freedom, and in one exec meeting on the topic he left the discussion disgruntled, saying, “I think if you guys have your way the only people using Twitter will be ISIS and the ACLU.”

It sounds like a Hollywood script, and that’s more or less how Costolo reacted after reading the report, calling it “absurd,” “laughably false” and “sensationalist nonsense.” He wasn’t clear which parts he was talking about; Obama, or the in-house abuse/safety schism.

It’s not easy being Twitter, that much is certain. Only last month the site was applauded for its banning of the internet’s self-proclaimed baddest “super-villain” – full-time egomaniac – Milo Yiannopoulos. The Breitbart blogger was removed from the site with a lifetime ban due to his chronic harassment of mainly women. At the same time Twitter was accused of oppressive rules by many of the blogger’s acolytes, resulting in a #FreeMilo movement.

Not surprisingly Breibart was quick to respond to the report stating that Twitter’s problem was not radically free expression but the “constant eroding of free speech.”

Photo credit: Kimberly Robyn via Flickr