New Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made another move to prevent viewpoint discrimination while he sorts out the dumpster fire known as Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” department. Bloomberg reports that employees got locked out of some internal tools used for content moderation:
Twitter Inc., the social network being overhauled by new owner Elon Musk, has frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, curbing the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major US election.
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.
The important part of this news is not that employees lost access to the tools. Instead, it is the confirmation that prior management empowered Twitter employees to determine what constitutes “misinformation.”
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For those who have had a Twitter account limited, shadow banned, or suspended, the article provides another piece of data. According to the report, a Twitter employee banned you, not an algorithm. “Detection of policy breaches can either be flagged by other Twitter users or detected automatically, but taking action on them requires human input and access to the dashboard tools. Those tools have been suspended since last week, the people said.”
These same employees are very worried about their loss of power to correct your wrongthink:
The scaled-back content moderation has raised concerns among employees on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, who believe the company will be short-handed in enforcing policies in the run-up to the US midterm election on Nov. 8. Trust and Safety employees are often tasked with enforcing Twitter’s misinformation and civic integrity policies — many of the same policies that former President Donald Trump routinely violated before and after the 2020 elections, the company said at the time.
This entire paragraph is a study in ridiculousness. President Donald Trump primarily questioned the results of the 2020 election and pointed out obvious irregularities. If this truly violated Twitter’s “civic integrity policies,” Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and a host of other Democrats would no longer have a Twitter account. It is evident that it is only a civic offense if a Republican questions the victory of a Democrat. Additionally, people have been voting in the United States for nearly three centuries without the geniuses at Twitter deciding what information they are allowed to review. Amazingly, we functioned as a nation before Twitter’s censors were on the job.
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The employees’ loss of access could also be a function of their bad judgment. On Thursday night, just before Musk took the helm, Just the News shared a story on alleged ballot harvesting in Florida. Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on the report, which included details of an affidavit from a former Democratic candidate alleging illegal ballot harvesting happened for years in central Florida. The warning told readers the “misleading” content “could lead to real world harm.”
The warning appeared when the content was shared by high-profile accounts like Just the News Founder John Solomon and Rasmussen Reports. According to the outlet, similar warnings have been placed on stories from Just the News about COVID-19 vaccine approvals, and Solomon was suspended for sharing a peer-reviewed study about the jabs. When Musk saw the news about the censorship, he tweeted, “I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side.”
Solomon is not the only reporter that has tripped the wire with Twitter’s speech police. PJ Media’s Matt Margolis has a warning attached to the URL for every story he writes when someone tweets it. Users verified this censorship is still in force this morning. Margolis’s account was also permanently suspended for pointing out that transgender Americans make up a small percentage of the population, and gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. It is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which outlines the diagnostic criteria for all mental health disorders.
Luckily, Musk sees the one-sided nature of many of these rules. Bloomberg reports:
Internally, employees say, Musk has raised questions about a number of the policies, and has zeroed in on a few specific rules that he wants the team to review. The first is Twitter’s general misinformation policy, which penalizes posts that include falsehoods about topics like election outcomes and Covid-19. Musk wants the policy to be more specific, according to people familiar with the matter.
Musk has also asked the team to review Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, according to the people, specifically a section that says users can be penalized for “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
While conservative users report some changes, such as increased follower counts and more interaction on the platform, some wrongs from the past will need to be righted as the rules are attenuated to accommodate public debate and meaningful discourse. But so far, it seems Musk is moving in the right direction.
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