Activision Blizzard: Frances Townsend deleted her Twitter account

Activision Blizzard

What happens if you defend your own company to the last despite a very serious charge and thousands of complaining employees? Frances Townsend, a senior executive at Activision Blizzard, wanted to get to the bottom of this question. The result is arguably not very good, as Townsend has now completely deleted her Twitter account.

Frances Townsend only joined Activision Blizzard in March of this year as Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs. Before this career jump, she worked for a long time in the US Justice Department, both under Clinton and under Bush. Around 2004 she was mainly active in the field of homeland security and counterterrorism and also carried out a tour of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq thereby the pressure to intensify their information gathering. The prison made some negative headlines for the mistreatment of prisoners by US troops.

However, Townsend saw no problem with torture methods such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity, as she said in a 2009 interview with CNN explained. Since then she has had the reputation of being a "torture apologist" for many people. When the recent indictment against Activision Blizzard was published, Townsend fell back into old behavior and defended the company. In an internal email, she claimed the lawsuit "paints the wrong picture of the company" and later described it as "worthless and irresponsible".

The CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, apologized a little later for his original reaction to the complaint and vowed to get better. Townsend, however, continued to stand by her point and on July 30th shared a critical report on whistleblowers from The Atlantic called "The New Moral Code of America's Elite." The reaction to this was of course very negative and Blizzard employees, journalists, and other Twitter users, too, exercised severe criticism.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external content from [PLATFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I agree that external content can be displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. Townsend's initial response to this was simply to block all Twitter users who sent her negative comments. This strategy was probably not too successful, which is why she has now completely deleted her Twitter account, which people like the Community Manager of World of Warcraft, Josh Allen, are almost celebrating.

"That Fran because of her Twitter account clearing the ActiBlizz situation, but not because of the war crimes she has defended in the past, is one of the biggest indicators of how strong this movement is. "

Also a UI / UX designer from Overwatch, Daniel Peterson, was far from satisfied with Townsend's handling of the situation and accused her of making an already bad situation for Activision Blizzard employees much worse.

Recommended editorial content At this point you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I agree that external content can be displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. Frances Townsend had no problem defending torture and the like, but a few days filled with negative news from gamers around the world have arguably brought the Activision Blizzard representative to her knees.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson confirmed that Frances Townsend is still an employee of the company and that the deletion of her Twitter account was purely her decision, not the company's.