Elon Musk Sparks Media Freakout by Limiting Employee Access to Twitter Censorship Tools
By Allum Bokhari
Published 1 Nov 2022
Published 1 Nov 2022
Elon Musk has limited Twitter employees’ access to content moderation tools in his first week of ownership, as he promises a radical change in course on censorship. The media, predictably, is claiming that the sky is falling.
Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk’s Twitter has frozen some employees’ access to tools designed to enforce the site’s content moderation policies, curtailing the power of employees to ban accounts, remove posts, and other acts of censorship, in what the outlet says “curb[s] the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major U.S. election.”
Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk’s Twitter has frozen some employees’ access to tools designed to enforce the site’s content moderation policies, curtailing the power of employees to ban accounts, remove posts, and other acts of censorship, in what the outlet says “curb[s] the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major U.S. 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.
People who were on call to enforce Twitter’s policies during Brazil’s presidential election did get access to the internal tools on Sunday, but in a limited capacity, according to two of the people. The company is still utilizing automated enforcement technology, and third-party contractors, according to one person, though the highest-profile violations are typically reviewed by Twitter employees.
