Twitter Limits Content-Enforcement Tools as US Election Looms
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What are Facebook's plans?
These things may not seem fully related, but they're important to stop things like Bitcoin scams, brigading and harassment. These are all things that'll cause people to leave the platform and fast, not to mention run quickly afoul of hate speech laws in other countries.
>Some still have full access but it’s a small group ~30. The company did this to keep employees from doing something unexpected given the Musk transition (the app code base was also frozen, e.g.)
>But with US election a week away some T&S folks worry they can’t do their job
>One other small but important note: Musk seems very interested in two specific policies:
>1. The general misinfo policy, which he feels is too broad
>2. A “hateful conduct” policy about targeting transgender people by misgendering or deadnaming
>He wants both to be reviewed
https://twitter.com/KurtWagner8/status/1587257843060641792
>A wide swath of Twitter's trust & safety team had access to content moderation/enforcement tools frozen last week. Usually, hundreds of people on the team could remove posts w/misinfo, hate speech etc. It's now down to 15 people.
https://twitter.com/jackiedavalos1/status/158726094893871923...
>People who were on call to enforce Twitter’s policies during Brazil’s election did get access to the internal tools on Sunday, but in a limited capacity, according to our sources.
>No one had access during the surge in hate speech on the platform Fri/Sat
>Twitter declined comment for our story.
> 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. Typically this level of access is given to a group of people numbering in the hundreds, and that was initially reduced to about 15 people last week
It's unclear from the article but this could be referring to the number of people allowed to push code changes to production. (Does Twitter even have a dev/test environment?)
Of course the blue-check journalists have officially (R) interpreted and are now disseminating these facts for us, and as we know journalists are never wrong.
> the surge in hate speech
The media is pushing this angle really hard, as this feeds the perpetual outrage machine that keeps them in business, and Elon is this week's target. In reality, the head of T&S at Twitter reported that there is a coordinated bot-driven trolling campaign going on. It would not surprise me if this was a smear campaign against Musk. Fabricate some hate speech, then craft a narrative in the MSM that it was all his fault. Unfortunately for them it seems they overplayed their hand and the campaign was uncovered.