Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has warned that the platform now known as Internet.
Speaking during on stage Interview at code conference This week, Yoel Roth noted With regulators in the bloc it is now “inevitable”.
“Regulatory time moves much slower than internet time. So I think we will see delayed effects here. But he suggested it is inevitable. “If the EU has proven anything, it is that it is willing and able to regulate big companies and get them to comply with EU laws. And so, if I had to make a prediction, it won’t be now – maybe not even a year from now – but there will be consequences.
“The question is how much damage is being done between now and then by individuals who work in companies – like myself – to the quality of conversation on Twitter, and on the platform itself? I think there is a lot that can be done before regulation catches up with reality, and that’s what really worries me.”
An X indicates an odd number
Roth recalls what he was thinking when he left Twitter last year, shortly after the Elon Musk acquisition ushered in a new era of platform drama, and said he thought business and regulatory factors would be a constraint on what the new owner might do in terms of damaging trust. And safety.
But he said his assumptions turned out to be wrong – pointing to the departure of the advertisers headed by Musk and the decision to withdraw the platform from the EU’s disinformation law. They are “the only big platform that can do this,” he noted. “And just today, Commissioner Jourova said that Twitter represents a tempting fate – and that it is an easy target to take. Well, I was wrong on that point too.
Back in April, before Musk pulled
The bloc has also made clear that its regulators will treat compliance with the (non-legally binding) Misinformation Law as a signal they will take into account when assessing whether larger platforms are compliant with the (legally binding) Misinformation Law.
Neglecting the societal threats posed by disinformation therefore risks significant sanctions in the EU. And not just financial; In addition to hefty fines, the DSA enables the Commission to ban services that repeatedly fail to adhere to the rulebook – so there is the added possibility that, if To the European Union market.
In other worrying signs about election security on Twitter, the information reported earlier this week that Musk had cut half of the remaining members of his election integrity team — which contradicts the company’s claims, and It was recently reiterated by its CEO, Linda YaccarinoIt is working to expand efforts to address threats to elections.
This week it also emerged that the platform had quietly removed an outdated option for reporting misinformation about politics — although, as we noted in our coverage, X users in the EU can still find an option to report “negative impacts on civil discourse or elections.” (Under a region-specific option to “report illegal EU content”). So it did not completely block EU users’ ability to report election integrity concerns.
However, without enough staff internally to handle the reports, it is clear that X will not be able to effectively tackle political disinformation or get a clear view of emerging threats to elections – including in the EU.
Under Musk, the platform’s “civic integrity” policy technically prohibits “tampering with or interfering in elections or other civic processes,” but as we know from how things worked at old Twitter for years — before the previous leadership’s very gradual shift to “conversationalism.” health” – We take Politics and Enforcement Politics are two completely different things.
Threatening the integrity of elections
Roth raised the fate of the election integrity team during the blog interview. “The last remaining employees at Twitter with election security experience have all been summarily terminated,” he said. “When I got into this year, and people started asking me what to expect for 2024, I said, look, there’s still one guy on Twitter in Dublin who single-handedly kept a global election from going off the rails. I hired him myself. He’s great. As long as That he can hold on to it there is hope. [But he’s been] “I was summarily dismissed, so I’m not very optimistic about that.”
The employee he mentioned is Aaron Rodricks, X’s Dublin-based associate director of trust, safety and threat disruption.
According to a report in Rolling StoneRodricks was targeted for harassment by right-wing influencers after a job posting he posted on LinkedIn publicizing the fact that he was looking to hire eight more employees to X’s election integrity team.
A series of online attacks, through accounts including Mike Benz‘s, employee It was suggested that he was trying to recruit CIA agents to work at X; He claimed he liked tweets criticizing Musk – and soon after the company took disciplinary action against him. Then, last week, Irish Press He reported that Rodricks obtained a temporary injunction from the Supreme Court. His account of X’s actions as “Complete hoaxHe persuaded the court to issue an injunction temporarily suspending disciplinary proceedings.
We’ve confirmed that Rodericks technically remains an employee of X but the legal dispute is still ongoing. He is clearly in no position to carry out the work he was doing internally on election integrity before a handful of right-wing trolls began a campaign of targeted harassment in an attempt to pressure Musk and get him fired.
The realization that Musk was making arbitrary decisions rather than following the “rule of law” was the final straw for Roth last year, when he made the decision to leave. “This all sounds to me like a company that has abandoned the rule of law,” he said during the interview. “Not just the laws of the land, like the Digital Services Act, but also the laws it imposed on itself — the operating principles that guided the company.”
no trust
Roth also revealed that the death threats he received after leaving Twitter last year had not been removed from the platform — undermining counterclaims made by CEO Linda Yaccarino that X is taking strides to improve safety.
“I would encourage Twitter to take a look at the death threats targeting me,” Roth said. “The death threats that were inspired by the company’s leader. They’re all still there. Twitter didn’t take them down. Thousands of them. And they’re still on the platform today.”
During the interview, Roth also didn’t ignore it The trusted.
It’s worth noting that under Musk’s leadership, So, it is once again moving against the grain of travel that EU regulators are demanding through their digital rulebook.
“By any measure [safety on Twitter] “It’s worse, except on the Twitter metric,” Roth said. “Just this week we saw a study by researchers in Europe talking about the prevalence and spread of misinformation across all major platforms. I’ll give you one guess as to which platform has the highest degree of reach: it’s Twitter. We’ve also seen research suggesting that the prevalence of hate speech and abuse on The platform is higher. We have seen Independent research This indicates that ISIS has achieved a 70% return on Twitter. This is not the same as freedom of expression. This is ISIS, isn’t it? As if we are not talking about the gray areas of content moderation.
“Peer review is a pain in the ass. Every academic will tell you that. But the reason it exists is so you can answer these questions in a satisfactory empirical way. You could say that if we’re talking about hate speech, it’s defined in a strict way. We don’t know,” he added. This is about the Twitter data.” “There is simply no way to know. It was not.”
Divesting the company’s communications team was another early “fix” for Musk’s Twitter. Since then, the platform has typically ignored press requests for comment and/or sent a meaningless automated response. (Her last automated response: “Busy now, please check back later.”) But CEO Yaccarino – Who was interviewed at the Code conference shortly after Ruth & He dismissed Roth’s assessment, repeating the claim that safety on the X has improved since Musk took over.
Also, in a slight departure from There) who she convinced to join her at her new employer this summer. “Linda addressed this on stage at Code,” he suggested, adding: “If memory serves me correctly, much of what Yowell discussed was similar to points he made at Code a year ago.”