Elon Musk continues to make moves at his newly acquired company. With about a week left to go before midterms, the billionaire businessman cut the number of employees who can can access censorship tools down to just 15 people, according to a report.
The move reduces the ability for Twitter employees to influence narratives on the platform, or ‘alter or penalize accounts that break rules around misleading information, offensive posts and hate speech.’
Employees will not be able to ban doctors and / or researchers posting information about Covid-19 that doesn’t fit the mainstream narrative, and all posts, except for the most ‘high-impact violations’, which will be set for manual review, will remain on the platform.
Members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team are concerned about their ability to enforce policies, (AKA influence narratives) in the lead up to the midterms on November 8. That team is usually in charge of enforcing Twitter’s misinformation and civic integrity policies – the same policies that targeted President Donald Trump on a consistent basis.
According to employees, Musk is questioning many policies and has pinpointed a few that he wants reviewed such as Twitter’s general misinformation policy, and Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, specifically a section that says users can be penalized for “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” according to Bloomberg.
It is not clear yet whether Musk wants to rewrite the policies or remove the restrictions entirely, although he has previously said that Twitter’s rules are too restrictive and he believes in absolute freedom of speech.
In both cases it is unclear if Musk wants the policies to be rewritten or the restrictions removed entirely.
