Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of trust and safety, legal and public policy, said Twitter believes "counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for de-radicalization, and we've seen that happen on other platforms, anecdotally."

Twitter is conducting in-house research to better understand how white nationalists and supremacists use the platform. The company is trying to decide, in part, whether white supremacists should be banned from the site or should be allowed to stay on the platform so their views can be debated by others, a Twitter executive told Motherboard.

When Motherboard described Twitter's plans on the phone, two of the academics laughed before responding.

Motherboard spoke to several academics who have studied Twitter and radicalization online. While most of them said that they are glad Twitter is finally thinking about the issue of white supremacists on the platform, several said they believe the company should be constantly researching these issues, and should have started long ago.

Do you work at Twitter? Did you used to? We'd love to hear from you. You can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de , or email joseph.cox@vice.com .

"Is it the right approach to deplatform these individuals? Is the right approach to try and engage with these individuals? How should we be thinking about this? What actually works?" she added.

"We're working with them specifically on white nationalism and white supremacy and radicalization online and understanding the drivers of those things; what role can a platform like Twitter play in either making that worse or making that better?" she said.

Gadde, who, along with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, met with President Trump to discuss the "health of the public conversation" on Twitter last month, said Twitter is working with external researchers on the work, but declined to name them, and added that the researchers are under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

"So one of the things we're working with academics on is some research here to confirm that this is the case," she added.

"That's wild," Becca Lewis, who researches networks of far right influencers on social media for the nonprofit Data & Society, said. "It has a ring of being too little too late in terms of launching into research projects right now. People have been raising the alarm about this for literally years now."

"I mean, these quotes are a disaster, I'm going to be honest," Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a progressive group that studies conservative disinformation, said. "The idea that they are looking at this matter seriously now as opposed to the past indicates the callousness with which they've approached this issue on their platform."

Other experts Motherboard spoke to acknowledged this is a complicated problem.

"I'm glad to hear that they're doing their due diligence and consulting experts on this complex matter," Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in an online chat. "Powerful (extremist or otherwise) actors will always find another way to get their word out, and we know from experience that speech restrictions (including of extremist content) all too often catch the wrong actors, who are often marginalized individuals or groups. And so I'm glad to see Twitter thinking creatively about this problem."

Twitter has faced repeated criticism for not taking a more aggressive approach towards banning white nationalists. In April, British MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter during a parliamentary committee hearing why the network had not banned former KKK leader David Duke.

"Is it the right approach to deplatform these individuals?"

After a Motherboard investigation, Facebook changed its policy and now bans white nationalism, white separatism and white supremacy. The reason for the switch, Facebook said at the time, was because white nationalism is linked to organized hate.