The social media company’s free-speech roots, coupled with an overwhelmingly white male leadership that was blind to the problem, led to total paralysis when it came to fixing its troll problem.

Nick Bilton, author of Hatching Twitter, returns with a sequel.

Twitter brawler and internet activist Suey Park became famous for creating #cancelcolbert, a hashtag that evoked an enormous amount of online outrage. This profile looks at Park’s life (both before and after the #cancelcolbert incident) as well as the larger phenomenon of internet shaming.

The social media diaries of three teenage friends reveals clues to the disappearance of one of them.

An excerpt from Bilton’s new book, Hatching Twitter: The untold story of Twitter’s true origins—and the contributions of Noah Glass, the co-founder who disappeared from the picture:

“What Glass didn’t know was that Dorsey was the one who wanted him out. Perhaps it was because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorsey’s idea alone. Whatever his reasons, Dorsey had recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasn’t let go. And for Williams, the decision was easy. Dorsey had become the lead engineer on Twitter, and Glass’s personal problems were affecting his judgment. (For a while, portions of the company existed entirely on Glass’s I.B.M. laptop.) After conferring with the Odeo board, around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 26, 2006, Williams asked Glass to join him for a walk to South Park. Sitting on a green bench, Williams gave his old friend an ultimatum: six months’ severance and six months’ vesting of his Odeo stock, or he would be publicly fired. Williams said the decision was his alone.”

Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars:

“Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers contribute content along with other users free of charge—and then pay extra to make their messages more prominent. The centerpiece of Twitter’s plans, what Costolo calls ‘the atomic unit of our ad strategy,’ is the ‘promoted tweet,’ a message from an advertiser that appears near the top of a user’s feed. Advertisers pay only when a user ‘engages’ with the tweet—retweets it, say, or clicks on a link. The more people click on an ad, the more the ad appears. Twitter executives trumpet an engagement rate of 3 percent to 5 percent, compared with less than 0.5 percent for normal banner ads.”

There’s no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. (Like Evan Williams. The day after Jack Dorsey announced his return to the company — via tweet, naturally — Williams quit his day-to-day duties at the company, although he remains a board member and Twitter’s largest shareholder, with an estimated 30% to 35% stake.) These theatrics, which go well beyond the usual angst at a new venture, have contributed to a growing perception that innovation has stalled and management is in turmoil at one of Silicon Valley’s most promising startups.