Twitter’s head of safety and integrity claims the company’s ‘core moderation capabilities’ are still in place despite the workforce losses. Moderation has been a concern ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
Twitter cut 15% of its trust and safety staff, but they say it won’t have any effect on how they moderate.
About half of Twitter’s employees just lost their jobs, but the company’s “core moderation capabilities” are still in place, the head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, said in a series of tweets on Friday night.
Roth said that “approximately” 15 percent of Twitter’s Trust and Safety group was affected by the layoffs. “Our frontline moderation staff was affected the least,” Roth said. Last week, the company limited access to some internal tools for “security reasons.” Roth didn’t say exactly when, but that would be around the time Elon Musk took over the company. “Most” content moderators who did frontline reviews weren’t affected, and access to those tools will be “fully restored in the coming days.”
Roth said that the number of “moderation actions taken” every day has “stayed steady,” but he only showed a vague chart of the number of tweets that are “reviewed and acted on” every day to back up his claim. Musk made his own statement about content moderation on Friday night. He said, “We’ve seen hate speech drop *below* our previous norms at times this week.”
Roth says that Twitter has had to “deprioritize a few workflows,” like helping people who have lost their passwords and “some” suspension appeals. Twitter is “working to get these back online in the coming days.”
Moderation on Twitter has been a concern in the run-up to the US midterm elections next week, but Roth said that keeping the integrity of the elections is still a “top priority.” Musk said last week that Twitter will set up a “content moderation council.” On Friday, he tweeted, “Again, to be absolutely clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.”
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