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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