Twitter Is Hiring A Tweeter In Chief: Must Be ‘FUN!’

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Owen Thomas
Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2012

This could have been a good strategy a decade ago, before Twitter’s abuse problems grew to an unfathomable scale.

“We want to elevate and thank the people who use us,” the job description reads. “Spark conversations that highlight what unites us. Make the platform and world feel a little smaller. And yes, we want to tell the story of Twitter’s purpose and product innovation. These things might be donuts, summoning circles, Serena Williams or the launch of Retweet with GIF.”

It’s an irony that Twitter as a company, having invented a whole category of real-time social media, has not been particularly good at it. The company did not have someone designated to run the @Twitter account full time until 2014 or so, former employees tell me. There’s now a team led by Helen Lawrence, the company’s global head of social media, and Shiraz Siddiqi, whose Twitter bio describes him as “tweeting for @Twitter,” among others.

It’s impossible to rewind the tape here, but one wonders whether Twitter would have such problems — its product innovation agonizingly slow, too much hateful behavior and drive-by abuse — if co-founder Ev Williams had looked for a Tweeter in Chief when he ran the company a decade ago. He could have found someone to model good behavior for the nascent service, to elevate good tweets and drown out the bad.

To take a stand, in other words, about Twitter’s purpose.

In 2008, Williams didn’t want to do that. When Ariel Waldman, now a NASA adviser and then a popular blogger, reported harassment, co-founder Biz Stone said it wasn’t Twitter’s business to distinguish between “update and insult.” Williams took it further, suggesting that Waldman was lying about the abuse she encountered: “Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they’re saying/assuming is true.” Incidents like that set the tone for Twitter’s hands-off approach to moderating conversations for years, allowing problems to fester and the rot to set in. Even Williams says he rarely reads his mentions because of the vitriol he knows he’ll encounter.

But if you’re going to become Tweeter in Chief, you can’t look away.

What you can do is emphasize Twitter’s brighter side. If you’re thinking of making a bid for Tweeter in Chief, be sure to brush up on “stan culture” (obsessive celebrity fandom, think Ramona the Love Terrier) and “creative activations” (publicity stunts). Most of all, the job description says, you should be all-caps “FUN!”

Beyond the happy talk and GIFs, having someone who serves as Twitter’s public face will mean that someone at headquarters will experience all the grief that regular users encounter. Will that be “FUN!”? Chief, you got me.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Twitter-is-hiring-a-Tweeter-in-Chief