Twitter can no longer protect its users from trolls, misinformation, and sexual exploitation of minors following changes and job cuts caused by host takeover Elon Musksupport current and former platform employees.

Academic data as well as user feedback demonstrating its improvement. hate speech led by Musk online activation harassment and the launch of accounts that follow misogynistic and abusive profiles confirm employee complaints.

Performance on the show Panorama From the BBC, current and former employees of the company, who are well aware of the situation before and after the media takeover, admit that their efforts to protect users are proving extremely difficult in what they say is a chaotic work environment in which Musk (par) is constantly accompanied by bodyguards. .

The former head of content planning claims that her entire team, which, among other things, created a number of security measures against online harassment, was fired, and she resigned. According to an internal study, these measures reduced trolling by 60%. “Now nobody is doing this work,” the Twitter engineer explains, comparing the platform to a building that looks good on the outside but is on fire inside.

An investigation into the show revealed, among other things:

• Concerns that child sexual exploitation is rampant on Twitter and not being sufficiently reported to the authorities.
• Targeted harassment campaigns aimed at restricting freedom of expression and foreign influence operations that were once carried out on a daily basis now go “under the radar”.
• 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
• Targeting rape victims from accounts that have become more active since the Twitter acquisition.

“An inexperienced employee does what 20+ people did”

“For someone who works, it is like a building where everything is on fire. When you look at it from the outside, its facade looks good, but nothing works inside,” says “Sam”, a platform developer who speaks on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

According to him, this chaos was caused by huge personnel changes. At least half of the employees have been laid off or fired since Musk took over, leaving people from other teams and departments to take on debt they don’t own to keep the system running.

“A brand new worker, with no experience, doing what more than 20 people once did. This leaves room for a lot more risk, a lot more chance of something going wrong,” he says.

In his opinion, this massive disorganization is due to the fact that Musk does not trust his employees. When he came to power, he said, he invited developers from Tesla and asked them to evaluate the code for several days before he himself decided which developers to fire. However, as “Sam” exaggerates, it takes “months” to understand such code…

As “Sam” says, the huge security that always and everywhere surrounds the Mask also speaks of the scale of distrust.

“Wherever he goes to the office, there are at least two bodyguards – tall, tall, like from a Hollywood movie. Even when he goes to the bathroom,” he says.

“Perhaps Twitter was a haven for journalists whose voices and criticism of the government were heard. Now I don’t think anything like this will continue,” predicts Ray Serrato, the group’s staffer responsible for cracking down on coordinated, government-led influence campaigns that advance a specific agenda and target activists and dissidents.

“A large number of specialists are no longer on the team that has dealt with specific areas or threat actors, from Russia to China,” he says, who resigned in November because, according to him, under new leadership and with a fragmented department, he is not feel how he was able to fulfill his work duty.

“Rory”, another insider, also known by a pseudonym, expresses concern about this knowledge leak and how it appears to undermine the priority of preventing pedophiles from using the platform to find victims. “Rory” until recently worked in the Child Sexual Exploitation Department.

His own team was tasked with identifying accounts that posted offensive content against children. Even before the takeover and the resulting layoffs, he considered the department to be understaffed.

Now, out of twenty people in the group, six remained.

“You can’t take ownership of a company and suddenly think you have knowledge about it … so you can fight child sexual exploitation without even having a special department,” he complains.

Source: BBC