CNN chief Jeff Zucker told staffers on Thursday morning that Twitter does a “terrible job” with harassment, and despite conversations with the social media platform to make the problem better, he said, “They suck.”
A suspicious package was sent to the network on Wednesday, and he addressed employees in New York City on Thursday morning and took questions from them.
Zucker announced a new security feature for the network in light of the package containing a pipe bomb and white powder sent to CNN’s New York offices: All mail going to CNN’s main bureaus in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Atlanta will be screened at off-site locations from now on.
He also said he’s not “going to pretend otherwise” or “sugarcoat” that all the targets of suspicious packages were also targets of President Donald Trump.
“I’m not going to shy away from what is the reality of what is going on with this country,” Zucker said to the staff.
When the conversation shifted to a question-and-answer session, a female reporter asked him about harassment on Twitter. She noted that harassment on the platform is not removed when she reports a post, but does get taken down when CNN communications reaches out to Twitter.
“Twitter is terrible with this. ... They do a terrible job with this,” Zucker said.
He was then asked if CNN needs to have a bigger conversation with Twitter about how to handle harassment, to which he responded, “We have had this conversation with Twitter, and they suck.“
A Twitter spokesperson told HuffPost in response to Zucker’s remarks: “Improving the health of the public conversation is our singular mission. We have consistently launched new products and policies to improve the experience of the people who use our service. We welcome feedback and are constantly looking for new ways to get better.”
Harassment on Twitter has been an issue for years, with the platform making small changes periodically. While its rules prohibit abuse and the site regularly suspends or blocks harassers who have been reported, many harassers still cause problems without consequences.
In May, Twitter said it revised its strategy for fighting abusive internet trolls by using “behavioral signals to identify harassers on the social network and then limit the visibility of their tweets,” according to Reuters.
This story has been updated to include comment from Twitter.