Last month, Twitter put up another blog post declaring that it had made strides to build a healthier service . Fewer bots, less spam, proactive policing of abuse. It sounded, again, like progress.

Then Twitters CEO, Jack Dorsey, appeared at TED2019 in Vancouver, Canada, to talk about the health of the conversation on his platform. Dorsey, who still commands puffy profiles in The New York Times , often resorts to meaningless jargon when confronted with actual questions . In Vancouver, he threw around terms like shared reality and variety of perspective. He talked about watching measurements trend over time. Eventually, the TED moderator, Chris Anderson, cut him off.

Jack, just picking up on some of the questions flooding in, Anderson said. A lot of people [are] puzzled why, like, how hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter?

Dorsey, who became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, laughed uncomfortably. Again with the Nazis? Dorsey has never had a good answer to this question. He still doesnt.

We have policies around violent and extremist groups, he told the audience in Vancouver. And the majority of our work and our terms of service works on conduct, not content. So were actually looking for conduct. So conduct being using the service to periodically or episodically to harass someone, using hateful imagery that might be associated with the KKK or the American Nazi Party. Those are all things that we act on immediately.

If those policies worked, the alt-right podcast king Mike Enoch Peinovich would not have been on Twitter this month mocking a new memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to African American victims of white supremacy . Peinovich would not be on Twitter advertising a neo-Nazi podcast on which he disparages the memorial as a dumb monument thats meant to be an assault on the white people of this country [because] nobody cares about black people... Kikes gave money to build this piece of trash. He would not be on Twitter inspiring one of his white nationalist followers to tweet a photo of flames consuming the memorial with the message: Shame to let that nice wood go to waste Metaphorically speaking a reference to the rash of arsons around the country targeting mosques, black churches and social justice centers.

The white supremacist accused of murdering 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March was also on Twitter, where he spread Islamophobia, white supremacist propaganda and articles about terrorist attacks. He tweeted pictures of his weapons and posted links to a disturbing manifesto he wrote, apparently in anticipation of the deadly rampage. Only after he was charged in a mass murder did Twitter act.

The shooter may have carried out the genocidal end goal of white supremacy, but there are thousands of white supremacists on Twitter with the same mindset, most of them anonymous and working in concert. In a 2018 study, extremism expert J.M. Berger offered an extremely conservative estimate that at least 100,000 alt-right users are on Twitter . The repercussions for these bad actors are practically nonexistent.

We just didnt invest enough, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who also became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, told CNN Business this week. We underestimated the level of bad actors that we would see and the level of impact they would have.

Take the anonymous alt-right troll called Spicci, who leads a harassment gang on Twitter called The Shed and has appeared on white nationalist podcasts to wish death on journalists. For years, Twitter has allowed him to run multiple fake accounts and use the service to menace people and tweet racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic content. Although Spicci has been reported countless times, Twitter typically does nothing. When the company does suspend him, he returns within minutes and continues harassing people. But the process of evaluating his conduct starts anew.

Norman Trey Garrison of Texas, a failed journalist turned white nationalist podcaster who goes by Spectre online, has similarly cycled through dozens of accounts and easily sidestepped Twitter suspensions so he can harass and threaten people. Twitter lets Amy Mekelburg, a notorious Islamophobe endorsed by President Donald Trump and followed by several members of his administration, stay on the platform to blast hate about Muslim invaders that is all too similar to some of the language in the Christchurch suspects manifesto. Mike Cernovich, a far-right propagandist, rape apologist and conspiracy theorist who collaborates with white nationalists, uses Twitter to smear people as pedophiles . But Cernovich, who has been praised by Donald Trump Jr. , is still on the platform as well, even after a man deluded by the Pizzagate disinformation campaign Cernovich spread stormed a restaurant with an AR-15 and fired off some shots.