This article is one-sided and full of factual inaccuracies.<p>Leslie did not start the product safety safety and security team in 2014 -- it had been started long before he arrived. He didn't even start the engineering arm of it, which also existed long before he arrived. While I can't say so conclusively, I also do not believe he was the head of engineering at Slack. I believe that was/is Michael Lopp (@rands).<p>Twitter has regularly been deleting spam, bot, and fake follower clusters for years, at a massive level. A cluster of Turkish fake followers was discovered in my time there and deleting it threw off user growth numbers for the quarter and also forward-looking guidance. That predictably had a negative effect on the stock. I'm sure there was discussion about what the right thing to do was, but they took the action that hurt them financially (both at the company and individual level) over the easy path.<p>Twitter is not perfect, but the people I worked with there were honestly trying very hard to strike a balance between protecting free speech and removing bad actors from the system.
Related article which came out a few days ago, concerning high profile alt-right Twitter personalities, which turned out to be Russian run accounts.<p><a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/russia-fake-twitter-facebook-posts-accounts-trump-election-jenna-abrams-20171103.html?amphtml=y&mobi=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/russ...</a>