Hi. Former Twitter anti-abuse employee here. If I had to sum up Twitter's executive leadership, it would be with Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Their leadership is mainly white and mainly men. I don't believe they really care about abuse in a meaningful way. They mainly care about it as a PR problem, so they'll do the minimum necessary to get out of trouble. But that's not because they hate anybody; it's because as a company they're not very good at getting anything at all done. They succeeded because they created a platform with a network effect; in that situation, competence is secondary.
My guess is that Smyte was failing as a business and looked around for an acquihire. I'd further guess that they had some connection at Twitter, and that getting a few engineers with relevant experience at a low price seemed like a good deal. So I'd suspect that nobody at Twitter cared either way what happened to Smyte customers.
Their leadership is mainly white and mainly men. I don't believe they really care about abuse in a meaningful way. They mainly care about it as a PR problem, so they'll do the minimum necessary to get out of trouble. But that's not because they hate anybody; it's because as a company they're not very good at getting anything at all done. They succeeded because they created a platform with a network effect; in that situation, competence is secondary.
My guess is that Smyte was failing as a business and looked around for an acquihire. I'd further guess that they had some connection at Twitter, and that getting a few engineers with relevant experience at a low price seemed like a good deal. So I'd suspect that nobody at Twitter cared either way what happened to Smyte customers.