Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is on fire today after CEO Dick Costolo announced he would step down in the coming weeks. Wall Street is full of advice for the firm’s next CEO, from product additions to getting bought by Apple, but Jim Cramer wants something different. He wants it to be easier to get libel taken off of the social network.
In a tweet sent right after Mr. Costolo announced he was stepping down at the firm, Mr. Cramer said “More advice now that @Dickc is gone. We need a code of conduct where libel suits are pressed quickly by $TWTR. 3 suits and done with that.”
Cramer Twitter suits pressed
Jim Cramer regularly complains about the amount of trolls he has to deal with on Twitter and he, like Mr. Costolo, feels that it is one of the big negatives with the service. Back in February Mr. Costolo said “We suck at dealing with abuse.” He promise then that the firm would try to do a better job of policing speech on Twitter. Mr. Cramer has not been happy with the work so far.
Just before making the Tweet about the new direction he wants Twitter to go in Mr. Cramer responded to another Twitter user, presenting their message and saying “Liars like this will have to be kicked off of $TWTR if it is ever going to get it right. Strike one! Trash a troll.”
There was a mixed response to Mr. Cramer’s idea about policing Twitter. User @Procyclicality said “With all the vicious, hateful treatment of women on Twitter, @jimcramer thinks 1st priority is people hating on him.”
User @theregans supported Mr. Cramer’s idea and added an idea of his own. “Need a rating system for users. Just like $EBAY for users by users. It will eliminate the trolls in short order.”
Mr. Cramer’s final tweet on Thursday evening read “Anyway, I gotta go do some work but I just think the libel, the hate, the accusations, these are what $TWTR has to figure out quickly.”
Taking libel from Twitter
In a piece on Twitter from last year, Mr. Cramer explained his position on libel more fully He said that “every slam or libel not met with a challenge or a denial is one that is viewed as a tacit admission of guilt,” in his eyes.
Therefore, “any charge of pumping and dumping when I don’t even own stocks and don’t tell people what I am going to say ahead of time are totally scurrilous and must be smacked down instantly, lest they be viewed as facts.”
Mr. Cramer owes everything to his reputation, and it’s not an asset he’s going to let go of easily. In the same blog post, which appeared on Mr. Cramer’s site The Street on November 12 2014, he speaks about actually bringing people to court over that kind of libel, “I’ve done it before successfully, so don’t dismiss the prospect,” he wrote.
Mr. Cramer says he’d love to “sue everyone who has ever charged this kind of nonsense.” If the famed investor has his way, the new CEO at Twitter will help him to do just that.
Twitter shares were up by more than 4% in this morning’s pre-market, but slipped back down in early trading. Of the 40 analysts that follow the firm, 23 rate it at Hold, 7 at Outperform and 8 at Buy. Just 2 rate the firm at Underperform and none of the analysts said that their clients should Sell stock in Twitter.
