Twitter's reputation as a hotbed for harassment and abuse may have helped lose it two potential buyers.
Bloomberg is reporting that Disney chose not to pursue an acquisition of Twitter in part because it thought the bullying and behaviour of some of the ailing social network's users might damage the entertainment company's image.
That news came shortly after a report by CNBC's Jim Cramer that Salesforce was also put off by Twitter's endemic troll problem.
The enterprise company's CEO, Marc Benioff, said Twitter was "not the right fit," but Cramer was more damning. "What's happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred," he said. "I know that the haters reduce the value of the company ... I know that Salesforce was very concerned about this notion."
Twitter has grappled with the problem of abusive behaviour on its platform for years. In a leaked memo from February 2015, then-CEO Dick Costolo said "we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years." And it's a problem that hasn't gone away. During Twitter's July 2016 earnings call, the company's current CEO, cofounder Jack Dorsey, told analysts the company hadn't "been good enough" at dealing with abuse "and we must do better."
The social network has been working on technical solutions to tackle the issue, but it has been accused of responding less vigorously to complaints of abuse and harassment than to other problematic content like copyright infringement.
—Dana Liebelson (@dliebelson) October 17, 2016
It now looks as if the abuse problem is no longer just a nightmare for its direct targets — it's also causing headaches for Twitter's financial prospects.
Twitter's stock jumped in recent weeks on reports it was in acquisition talks with multiple companies, but Google, Salesforce, and Twitter, the main suitors, have all reportedly backed out.
According to Bloomberg, trolling isn't the only reason Disney opted against trying to buy Twitter. There were also questions around its size and profitability, for example. But Disney is one of the most powerful and highly regarded brands on earth — being tied to a social network in which a black actress was hounded off the platform by racists for having the temerity to star in a remake of "Ghostbusters" might be a hard sell to investors.
Former engineering manager Leslie Miley told BuzzFeed News in August that the company did not follow up on potential solutions if they damaged the site's growth. "I did see a lot of decisions being made in terms of growth when it came to how to handle abuse, which I get," he said. "But on the other side, if there’s a trash fire burning in your front yard, saying you don't want to call the fire department because you don't want to get the house wet is not really a sensical thing."
This strategy might have made sense to Twitter executives during the company's boom years, but now that growth is flatlining the company is struggling to turn a profit, and the decision not to be more proactive about abuse seems to be coming back to haunt it.
