Twitter will tackle hate speech

MICRO-BLOGGING MESSENGER Twitter is thinking about how best to tackle hate speech and bad talking on its users' web pages.

The firm is charging itself with working out how best to preserve freedom of speech while making sure that people do not abuse that right by making racist and hateful comments.

It's not going to be easy, and in an interview with the Financial Times that much was made clear.

"The reason we want to allow pseudonyms is there are lots of places in the world where it's the only way you'd be able to speak freely," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

"The flipside of that is it also emboldens these trolls... how do you make sure you are both emboldening people to speak politically but making it OK to be on the platform and not endure all this hate speech? It's very frustrating."

Costolo told the FT that one potential method of stifling trolling would be to hide responses from users who are not seen as "authoritative". These would be users with no followers, no biography and an egg where a profile picture would be.

These accounts that can easily be used to abuse people could effectively be ignored, he suggested. However that might come at a cost, as some legitimate and inoffensive users might just be shy or lacking a camera. µ