At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”

Calls to rethink that approach were ignored by senior executives, according to people familiar with the situation. “There was no real sense of urgency,” the former executive explained, pointing the finger at Harvey’s superiors, including current C.E.O. Jack Dorsey. “It’s a technology company with crappy technologists, a revolving door of product heads and C.E.O.s, and no real core of technological innovation. You had Del saying, ‘Trolls are going to be a problem. We will need a technological solution for this.’” But Twitter never developed a product sophisticated enough to automatically deal with with bots, spam, or abuse. “You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into. You fast forward, and it was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we just have basic rules in place where if the suggestion is to suspend an account of a verified person, there should be a process in place to have a flag for additional review, or something?’ You’d think it would take, like, one line of code to fix that problem. And the classic response is, ‘That’s on our product road map two quarters from now.’”

“Jack is not decisive ... You just can’t have a company with no desire or ability to make decisions.”

Dysfunction is nothing new for Twitter, which has been plagued by management troubles since its founding. Over the last ten years, Twitter has cycled through three C.E.O.s—four, if you include Dorsey’s return in 2015—without ever committing to a comprehensive vision for itself. (The fact that Dorsey is simultaneously serving as C.E.O. for Square, another public company, hasn’t helped.) “Jack is not decisive,” a former employee says. “You just can’t have a company with no desire or ability to make decisions. It’s not just abuse, but also product decisions. We used to debate for a thousand hours and the boss man couldn’t make a decision. If you’re unwilling to make anyone upset, it can be paralyzing in many cases. And user abuse is a case like that.”

Harvey’s defenders say she has the institutional knowledge to tackle the abuse issue, but is under-resourced for what is arguably an insurmountable task. “It seems her heart is very much in it,” the third former executive told me. “If you are a company of amateur-hour technology, so that everything becomes some nightmarish Rube Goldberg construction, in some cases, the best people to keep around are the ones who understand how the Rube Goldberg machines work.” Danielle Citron, a Twitter trust and safety partner and a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, emphasized that if Harvey’s team is sometimes slow to address abuse, it’s only because they care so much about getting each case right. “They mean it when they say they care about speech that terrorizes and silences,” Citron said. “They really do have their users’ speech issues in mind in a way that’s very holistic.”

But as Twitter grows and matures, the counter-argument goes, it also needs to take its responsibilities more seriously. If the buck stops at the top, the blame lies with Dorsey. Yet the question remains: If Harvey can’t solve the problem on her own, shouldn’t someone else take the wheel? “[Harvey] is over-titled and overpaid,” the former employee told me. “She joined this company early and got to ride the wave. I know why she would never quit. It’s a little bit like asking Ringo Starr why he never left the Beatles: it was the best job he ever had.” There are two main components to Harvey’s job, this person told me: to formulate a clear set of rules for what constitutes abusive speech, and to be consistent in enforcing them. “And I hate to say it, but she clearly was in so far over her head on both of those. It was a disaster. I’m sure she’s a nice person personally, but in this job, she was utterly incompetent.”