Twitter less safe: Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth said Twitter has become less safe because of Elon Musk’s hands-off approach to content moderation, and his lack of a transparent process for making and enforcing platform policies.
He also said there are not enough employees left at the company who understand trust and safety to moderate the platform effectively.
Suspended accounts restored
Musk, who claims to be a “free speech absolutist”, had previously said Twitter will have a “content moderation council” and any problematic accounts suspended earlier would not be reinstated before the council’s creation. However, through a series of “vox populi, vox dei” (voice of the people) online polls, the billionaire has restored a number of suspended accounts in recent days, including Donald Trump’s.
Roth’s statement is just the opposite of what he said in a New York Times op-ed on November 18. He had then written that Twitter was actually safer under Musk than it was before “by some measures.”
However, in that same op-ed, he also criticised the impulsive changes Musk was making at Twitter and his “tweet-length pronouncements” about the website’s rules.
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“A Twitter whose policies are defined by edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” he wrote at the time.
‘A disaster that slipped through’
Roth said Musk has unleashed chaos at Twitter after his takeover last month, and that the botched rollout of the $8 paid verification feature “is an example of a disaster that slipped through”.
Musk launched the revamp of the Twitter Blue premium subscription despite warnings and advice from the trust and safety team, the former trust and safety chief said.
“It went off the rails in exactly the ways that we anticipated,” he said in an interview. Roth who resigned two weeks after Elon Musk took over Twitter, paid verification feature was one of many factors that forced him to leave.
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