Elon Musk wasn’t kidding when he said that he would make changes on how Twitter operates. On day one, he immediately fired four of the top executives. Then yesterday, someone banned the Arizona GOP candidate for Secretary of State in Arizona, mark Finchem for no apparent reason other than to help out the Democratic candidate. Within one hour, Musk had Finchem back up and operating on Twitter. He must have realized the censorship tools had to be limited.
The mainstream press is boiling mad after Musk limited the number of people with access to the censorship tools. After all, if a story gets a lot of coverage on Twitter, they will eventually have to report on the story themselves instead of burying it like they did Hunter Biden’s laptop. Censoring conservative candidates in the last week before an election is number three in the liberal social media playbook. Ap0parently, Musk does not intend to allow that to happen.
Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk’s Twitter has frozen some employees’ access to the tools used to censor conservative posts or conservative sites. Evidently, a large number of employees formerly had the ability to silence conservative voices, all with the blessing of the upper-tier managers. This was allegedly in order to clamp down on misinformation. Misinformation according to Democrats is anything that does not conform to their radical ideology.
Via Bloomberg:
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.
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Rolling Stone reporter Charisma Madarang wrote:
“The drastic change in content moderation could potentially affect Twitter’s Trust and Safety team’s ability to both monitor and enforce moderation policies ahead of the U.S. midterm election on Nov. 8.”
Time also picked up the narrative in an article titled, “Twitter Limits Content Moderation Tools Ahead of Midterm Elections.”
The concern that the social media company, which jettisoned “trust & safety” arch-censor Vijaya Gadde as well as CEO Parag Agrawal in some of Musk’s first moves, may not be able to effectively interfere in the midterms was echoed by Rolling Stone.
To the media, it is now an expectation rather than a matter of controversy that social media platforms will ramp up censorship and interference ahead of an election.
Yoel Roth, a leftist holdover at Twitter who once decried Donald Trump as a “racist tangerine” and complained about “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” but who for now has the support of Musk, attempted to calm the media’s fears.
“This is exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk. We’re still enforcing our rules at scale,” tweeted Roth, who currently leads Twitter’s “safety & integrity” team.
