Hateful content on Twitter rose sharply in the week before Elon Musk tweeted on November 23 that impressions, or views, of hateful speech, were declining.
Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favouring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety says.
The interview was held a day before Twitter suspended rapper Kanye West, who now goes by the name Ye, after he tweeted a picture of a swastika merged with the Star of David. It is the second time this year that Ye has been suspended from the platform over antisemitic posts. On Friday, Musk vowed “significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech” in a meeting with France President Emmanuel Macron.Irwin said Musk encouraged the team to worry less about how their actions would affect user growth or revenue, saying safety was the company’s top priority. “He emphasises that every single day, multiple times a day,” she said.
Twitter has long deployed such “visibility filtering” tools around misinformation and had already incorporated them into its official hateful conduct policy before the Musk acquisition. The approach allows for more freewheeling speech while cutting down on the potential harms associated with viral abusive content.
She said layoffs did not significantly impact full-time employees or contractors working on what the company referred to as its “Health” divisions, including in “critical areas” like child safety and content moderation. She said Musk was focused on using automation more, arguing that the company had in the past erred on the side of using time- and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content.On child safety, for instance, Irwin said Twitter had shifted toward automatically taking down tweets reported by trusted figures with a track record of accurately flagging harmful posts.
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