''' '' TWITTER OPINION
TROUNCE '' '''
I LED THE TRUST AND SAFETY TEAMS AT TWITTER. HERE'S what could happen next : This month, I chose to leave my position leading trust and safety at Elon Musk's Twitter.
My teams were responsible for drafting Twitter's rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds and millions of tweets per day. In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed government backed troll farms meddling in elections, introduced tools for contextualising dangerous misinformation and, yes, banned President Donald Trump from the service.
The Cornell professor Tarleton Gillispie called teams like mine ''custodian of the Internet.'' The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious.
ENTER MR. MUSK.
IN A NEWS RELEASE announcing his agreement to acquire the company, Mr. Musk laid out a simple thesis :
''Free speech is the bedrock of functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.''
He said he planned to revitalize Twitter by eliminating spam and drastically altering its policies to remove only illegal speech.
Since the deal closed on Oct. 27, many of the changes made by Mr. Musk and his team have been sudden and alarming for employees and users alike, including rapid-fire layoffs and an ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter's verification system.
A wave of employee resignations cause the hashtag RIPTwitter to trend on the site on Thursday - not for the first time - alongside questions whether a skeleton crew of remaining staff members can keep the service, now 16 years old, afloat.
And yet when it comes to content moderation, much has stayed the same since Mr.Musk's acquisition. Twitter's rules continue to ban a wide range of lawful but awful speech. Mr. Musk has insisted publicly that the company's practices and policies are unchanged. Are we just in the early days, or has the self-declared free speech absolutist had a change of heart?
The truth is that Elon Musk's brand of radical transformation has unavoidable limits.
Advertisers have played the most direct role thus far in moderating Mr. Musk's free speech ambitions. As long as 90 percent of the company's revenues come from ads [ as was the case when Mr.Musk bought the company], Twitter has little choice but to operate in a way that won't imperil the revenue streams that keep the lights on. This has already proved to be challenging.
Almost immediately upon the acquisition close, a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling emerged on Twitter. Wary marketers, including those at General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, slowed down or paused ad spending on the platform, kicking off a crisis within the company to protect precious ads revenue.
In response, Mr. Musk empowered my team to move more aggressively to remove hate speech across the platform - censoring more content, not less. Our actions worked : Before my departure, I shared data about Twitter's enforcement of hateful conduct, showing that by some measures, Twitter was actually safer under Mr.Musk than it was before.
Marketers have not shied away from using the power of the purse : In the days following Mr. Musk's acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to ''brand safety.''
It's perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said that he wants to move away from ads as Twitter's primary revenue source : His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site's future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.
But even if Mr. Musk is able to free Twitter from the influence of powerful advertisers, his path to fettered speech is still not clear. Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates.
Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union's chief platform regulator posted on the site to remind Mr. Musk that in Europe, an unmoderated free for all won't fly.
In the United States, members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns about the company's recent actions. And outside the United States and the European Union, the situation becomes even more complex.
Mr. Musk's principle of keying Twitter's policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it was loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.
REGULATORS have significant tools at their disposal to enforce their will on Twitter and on Mr. Musk.
The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Speech on Twitter, Democracy and Dissent, continues. The World Students Society thanks author
Yoel Roth, who spent seven years directing Twitter's policy and enforcement work on abuse, election security and anti-spam issues.
With respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
Good Night and God Bless
SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless
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