The Strangeness of Scale at Twitter

Del Harvey runs Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team, and she is funny. Her TED2014 Talk just went online.

“The vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm’s way; my job is to root out activity that might. 99.999% of tweets pose no risk to anyone. After you take out that 99.999%, the tiny percentage remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we’re dealing with makes things difficult.”

“It’s crucial that I not only predict, but also design protections for the unexpected. Twitter strips all geo-data from photos uploaded to the system.”