S.O.S.

The One Company That Could Fix Twitter

And why it’s incentivized not to.
This image may contain Jack Dorsey Human Person Mark Zuckerberg Man Clothing and Apparel
Left, from Bloomberg, right, by Justin Sullivan, both from Getty Images.

A number of years ago, a passionate, and somewhat existential, debate broke out at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. A small group of employees proposed the idea that Facebook, by default, should allow its users to say whatever they wanted on the platform, just as they could on Twitter. At the time, this contingent of Facebook employees argued that it wasn’t the company’s responsibility to effectively police what opinions could, and could not, be expressed on the platform. It was each individual’s choice.

Others within the company, however, argued that there should be limits to what people could say—namely that users shouldn’t be allowed to attack people, and, most important, that they shouldn’t be able to say things that could hurt others. In the end, Mark Zuckerberg stepped in, as he often does, and issued the final word. A participant in the discussion once told me that Zuckerberg wanted “safety” to come first on Facebook. Hence, the creation of Facebook’s “Community Standards,” which delineates what you can, and cannot, articulate on the platform. In addition to banning direct threats to people, criminal activity, and sexual exploitation, Facebook notably does not “tolerate bullying or harassment.”

At around the same time, some 30 miles north of Facebook’s campus, executives at Twitter were embroiled in a similar discussion. At Twitter, however, most people argued that it wasn’t the company’s responsibility to oversee what their users could say. Since its inception, after all, Twitter was about free speech. In some ways, this benefited the company (and society) enormously; the platform fostered conversation and awareness around the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and an entire new genre of protest known as hashtag activism, among many other events. But the flip side of this ideology is that Twitter’s “Rules” section doesn’t feature a single mention of the word “bullying.” (Representatives from Twitter and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

VIDEO: From the V.F. Summit: How Do You Fix Twitter?

There are many factors that explain Facebook’s extraordinary financial success and Twitter’s decline, but trolling is among them. Bullying, Facebook realized early on, is bad for business. The company now boasts 1.71 billion users, a market capitalization of around $373 billion, and Zuckerberg is seen as a genius savant in Silicon Valley. Twitter, on the other hand, has been hammering away at a concrete ceiling of just over 317 million users (that’s five and a half times less than Facebook), it has a market cap of under $12 billion (some 30 times less than Facebook), and is seen as the haven for mean, angry, vicious bullies on the Internet—and I’m not just talking about Donald Trump. Twitter, in the meantime, has also seen scores of A-list celebrities depart from the service, many of them citing “trolls” as the reason.

The troll issue appears to undergird Twitter’s latest troubles, too. In recent weeks, both Salesforce and Disney have passed on acquiring the company. Marc Benioff, the founder and C.E.O. of Salesforce, noted that he has been troubled by the amount of hate speech expressed on Twitter. It’s hard to see how Disney, America’s foremost family-friendly media company, was not bothered by that, either. Meanwhile, Twitter is paying the price in layoffs, a sagging stock price, and an existential conversation of its own. So where does it go from here?

Years ago at Facebook headquarters, something else happened involving Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter. In a small conference room, Zuckerberg tried to buy the company that was then one of his most tormenting competitors. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two of Twitter’s co-founders, offered a flat-out “no thanks” to Facebook’s $500 million offer. Later, as I reported in Hatching Twitter, my book about the company, Zuckerberg made another acquisition attempt at his home in Palo Alto. But again, the founders declined. It wasn’t just that Williams and Stone (and the Twitter board) didn’t want to sell Twitter to Facebook. They had no desire to sell the company at all.

These days, that is no longer the case. The rumor machine has been churning with speculation about who might buy the beleaguered company. The list of suitors has been long—reportedly including, besides Disney and Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and others. Yet Facebook has been notably absent. There’s a lot of speculation in Silicon Valley as to why, and a lot of answers floating around.

First, there are the regulatory issues such a deal would inevitably face. Facebook isn’t just a 1.71-billion strong social network: it also has 500 million monthly users on Instagram and a billion more users on WhatsApp. An acquisition of Twitter would leave Snapchat as the only real social network that isn’t owned by Facebook, even though Snapchat feels like less of a social network and more of a communications platform.

If Facebook really wanted the company, they could try to work around that obstacle. But there may be another reason Facebook is unlikely to buy Twitter, too. Facebook actually benefits from having Twitter alive and puttering. When it sells its service to advertisers, Facebook can point to its obvious advantages, in scale and safety, over Twitter. They have all these users, and reach all of these people, and it’s a relatively safe place (barring political debates with family members), so advertisers don’t have to worry about their chocolate-chip-cookie ad campaign showing up next to a bunch of trolls, or worse, terrorists. What better barometer could Facebook ask for to entice new advertisers, new users, and new employees?

The difficulty Twitter faces solving its bullying problem has been virtually unsolvable for years. In an internal discussion in early 2015, then C.E.O. Dick Costolo acknowledged this challenge. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” he wrote to his employees. “We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.” He added: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as C.E.O. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it.” Has anything changed under Jack Dorsey’s leadership? Just ask, Leslie Jones, the star of Ghostbusters, who has spent the year being viciously trolled on the platform.

It seems that all the C.E.O.s and executives who have run Twitter have acknowledged there was, and still is, a problem, and it has been largely unsolved. Zuckerberg clearly understands that one small aspect of your product will affect every other facet of a social ecosystem, which in turn affects every aspect of your business. And, in an unpleasant irony, the one company that seems like it could fix Twitter’s bullying is also the company that is benefiting the most from Twitter’s inability to fix itself.