#Hijacked

Abuse.

Harassment.

Radicalization.

Spam.

Disinformation.

Bots.

Toxicity.

YAIR ROSENBERG WANTED TO TROLL THE TROLLS.

Rosenberg, a senior writer for Jewish-focused news-and-culture website Tablet Magazine, had become a leading target of anti-Semitic Twitter users during his reporting on the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Despite being pelted with slurs, he wasn’t overly fixated on the Nazis who had embraced the service. “For the most part I found them rather laughable and easily ignored,” he says.

But one particular type of Twitter troll did gnaw at him: the ones who posed as minorities—using stolen photos of real people—and then infiltrated high-profile conversations to spew venom. “Unsuspecting readers would see this guy who looks like an Orthodox Jew or a Muslim woman saying something basically offensive,” he explains. “So they think, Oh, Muslims are religious. Jews are religious. And they are horrifically offensive people.”

Rosenberg decided to fight back. Working with Neal Chandra, a San Francisco–based developer, he created an automated Twitter bot called Imposter Buster. Starting in December 2016, it inserted itself into the same Twitter threads as the hoax accounts and politely exposed the trolls’ masquerade (“FYI, this account is a racist impersonating a Jew to defame Jews”).

Imposter Buster soon came under attack itself—by racists who reported it to Twitter for harassment. Unexpectedly, the company sided with the trolls: It suspended the bot for spammy behavior the following April. With assistance from the Anti-Defamation League, Rosenberg and Chandra got that decision reversed three days later. But their targets continued to file harassment reports, and last December Twitter once again blacklisted Imposter Buster, this time for good.

Rosenberg, who considers his effort good citizenship rather than vigilantism, still isn’t sure why Twitter found it unacceptable; he never received an explanation directly from the company. But the ruling gave racists a win by technical knockout.

For all the ways in which the Imposter Buster saga is unique, it’s also symptomatic of larger issues that have long bedeviled Twitter: abuse, the weaponizing of anonymity, bot wars, and slow-motion decision making by the people running a real-time platform. These problems have only intensified since Donald Trump became president and chose Twitter as his primary mouthpiece. The platform is now the world’s principal venue for politics and outrage, culture and conversation—the home for both #MAGA and #MeToo.

This status has helped improve the company’s fortunes. Daily usage is up a healthy 12% year over year, and Twitter reported its first-ever quarterly profit in February, capping a 12-month period during which its stock doubled. Although the company still seems unlikely ever to match Facebook’s scale and profitability, it’s not in danger of failing. The occasional cries from financial analysts for CEO Jack Dorsey to sell Twitter or from critics for him to shut it down look more and more out of step.

Despite Twitter’s more comfortable standing, Dorsey has been increasingly vocal about his service’s problems. “We are committed to making Twitter safer,” the company pledged in its February shareholder letter. On the accompanying investor call, Dorsey outlined an “information quality” initiative to improve content and accounts on the service. Monthly active users have stalled at 330 million—a fact that the company attributes in part to its ongoing pruning of spammers. Twitter’s cleanup efforts are an admission, albeit an implicit one, that the array of troublemakers who still roam the platform—the hate-mongers, fake-news purveyors, and armies of shady bots designed to influence public opinion—are impeding its ability to grow. (Twitter did not make Dorsey, or any other executive, available to be interviewed for this story. Most of the more than 60 sources