Twitter, currently being overhauled by new owner Elon Musk, has frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other enforcement tools ahead of the major U.S. midterm elections.
Kurt Wagner, Edward Ludlow, Jackie Davalos, and Davey Alba for Bloomberg News:
Most people who work in Twitter’s Trust and Safety organization are currently unable to alter or penalize accounts that break rules around misleading information, offensive posts and hate speech, except for the most high-impact violations that would involve real-world harm, according to people familiar with the matter. Those posts were prioritized for manual enforcement, they said.
MacDailyNews Take: “Hate speech” is far too often the pretext for banning speech that certain quarters hate.
The company is still utilizing automated enforcement technology, and third-party contractors, according to one person, though the highest-profile violations are typically reviewed by Twitter employees.
In response to this story, Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity at Twitter, tweeted: “This is exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk. We’re still enforcing our Twitter rules at scale.”
This restriction is part of a broader plan to freeze Twitter’s software code to keep employees from pushing changes to the app during the transition to new ownership.
Musk tweeted last week that he hadn’t made “any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies” so far, though he has also said publicly that he believes the company’s rules are too restrictive, and has called himself a free-speech absolutist.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, it’s so perplexing why Musk would prevent legacy Twitter staffers from having the ability to block major breaking news, suspend media outlets, mute journalists’ accounts, etc. just prior to an election? It’s an unfathomable mystery.
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The Hunter Biden laptop story would not have been suppressed and Joe’s smartest guy he knows would show voters how debauch this family truly is and enough voters would not have voted for this half brain dead dementia Joe who is embarrassing the nation.
Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” organization….
This alone has a nice 1984-ish ring?
Is the abhorrence of such groups just a symptom of conservative’s “ill-health”, or do liberals embrace because the info contained/presented favored their own tilt?
Let’s see who gets bonuses; Then we can make some preliminary conclusions.
Trust and Safety = Censorship
What goes around, comes around as Democrats and their promotion department Big Media heads EXPLODE. Yes, indeed, paybacks are hell…
I’ve also grown weary of social media’s disconnect — in both a physical sense and that of true identity — through which the worst verbal violence can be and too often are readily made without consequence for the aggressor.
Nevertheless, social media like Facebook have nonetheless enabled far greater information freedom than that allowed by what had been a rigidly gatekept news and information virtual monopoly held by the pre-2000 electronic and print mainstream news-media.
Besides the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, I seriously doubt that Greta Thunberg’s pre-pandemic formidable climate change movement, for example, would’ve been able to regularly form on such a congruently colossal scale if not in large part for the widely accessible posting and messaging systems of Facebook.
Still, contrary to conservatives’ adamant proclamations, I’ve found that social media silences progressive voices as much as, if not more than, conservative opinions. As but one example, my own Facebook account (which received relatively very few Dislikes) was “Disabled” without any explanation.