Great article by Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair about the future of Twitter.
Vanity Fair special correspondent Nick Bilton reports on the state of Twitter, writing that the rise of its most famous user—Donald Trump—and the defection of its top executives, would seem to spell doom for the company. Early Twitter employees tell Bilton they regret their involvement in a company that became a tool of the alt-right, while a former developer says he regrets not building a tool to fight trolls.
“If anything,” Bilton writes, “Trump has become another headache for Twitter. Some in Silicon Valley have relayed to me that they wouldn’t work at Twitter precisely because of the platform it has afforded the incoming president. Early employees at Twitter have also said to me that they regret being involved in a company that would become a vessel for an army of alt-right trolls. One early Twitter developer recently told me that one of his biggest regrets in his career was not building some sort of design mechanism that could have helped Twitter extinguish its troll problem. If he had, we most certainly would be living in a different sort of world.”
