Elon Musk Twitter is relying primarily on automation to monitor material, eliminating certain manual checks and preferring distribution limits over outright censorship, according to the company’s new head of trust and safety, who spoke to Reuters.
Twitter is also banning abuse-prone hashtags and search results in areas such as child exploitation, regardless of the potential impact on “benign usage” of those terms, according to Ella Irwin, Twitter Vice President of Trust and Safety Product.
“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” Irwin said in the first interview with a Twitter executive since Musk’s purchase of the social media business in late October.
Her remarks come as academics claim an increase in hate speech on the social media service following Musk’s announcement of an amnesty for accounts suspended under the previous leadership of the firm that had not breached the law or engaged in “egregious spam.”
Since Musk slashed half of Twitter’s staff and issued an ultimatum to work long hours, which resulted in the loss of hundreds more employees, the company has faced pointed questions about its ability and willingness to moderate harmful and illegal content.
Furthermore, advertisers, Twitter’s primary revenue source, have abandoned the network due to concerns about brand safety.
Musk promised “significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech” in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
Irwin stated that Musk encouraged the staff to be less concerned with how their actions might impact user growth or income, stating that safety was the company’s main priority. “He emphasises that every single day, multiple times a day,” she explained.
The safety strategy According to former employees familiar with the work, the changes Irwin described reflect, at least in part, an acceleration of changes that had already been planned since last year around Twitter’s handling of hateful conduct and other policy violations.
One approach, encapsulated in the industry mantra “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” entails keeping certain tweets that violate the company’s policies up but preventing them from appearing in places such as the home timeline and search.
Before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter had long used such “visibility filtering” tools to combat misinformation and had already incorporated them into its official hateful conduct policy. The strategy allows for more free expression while reducing the potential downsides connected with viral abusive content.
According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the number of tweets containing hateful content on Twitter increased sharply in the week before Musk tweeted on November 23 that impressions, or views, of hateful speech were declining – in one example of researchers pointing to the prevalence of such content while Musk touts a reduction in visibility.
Tweets containing anti-Black terms were quadruple the number observed in the month before Musk took control, while tweets featuring a gay slur were up 31%, according to the study.
More risks, move faster
Irwin, who joined Twitter in June and previously worked in safety roles at Amazon.com and Google, disputed claims that the firm lacked the resources or motivation to defend the network.
She stated the layoffs had no substantial impact on full-time staff or contractors working on the company’s “Health” divisions, including “critical areas” such as kid protection and content moderation.
According to two sources familiar with the layoffs, more than half of the Health engineering team was laid off. Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the assertion, but previously denied that layoffs had a significant impact on the Health team.
She also stated that the number of individuals working on child safety had not changed since the acquisition, and that the team’s product manager was still in place. Irwin stated that Twitter backfilled certain positions for workers who left the firm, but she declined to disclose exact figures for the turnover.
She claimed Musk was more focused on employing automation, noting that the corporation had previously erred by relying on time- and labor-intensive human inspections of damaging content.
“He’s encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe,” she explained.
In terms of child safety, Irwin stated that Twitter had switched toward automatically removing tweets reported by trustworthy persons who have a track record of appropriately detecting harmful postings.
Carolina Christofoletti, a threat intelligence researcher at TRM Labs who specialises in child sexual abuse materials, said Twitter had recently removed some information as quickly as 30 seconds after she reports it, without acknowledging receipt of her report or confirming its decision.
In an interview on Thursday, Irwin stated that Twitter, in partnership with cybersecurity firm Ghost Data, removed over 44,000 accounts involved in child safety violations.
Twitter is also blocking hashtags and search results that are regularly associated with abuse, such as searches for “teen” pornography. She claimed that previous concerns about the impact of such limits on permissible usage of the terms were no longer valid.
The usage of “trusted reporters” was “something we’ve discussed in the past at Twitter, but there was some hesitancy and frankly just some delay.”
“I think we now have the ability to actually move forward with things like that,” she remarked.
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