Image Courtesy: Twitter
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth said in his first interview since leaving this month that the firm no longer had enough employees for safety work on Tuesday that the social media giant was no safer under new owner Elon Musk.
Following Musk’s takeover, Roth had tweeted that, in some ways, Twitter safety had improved under the billionaire’s leadership.
When asked if he still felt that way during a Tuesday interview at the Knight Foundation conference, Roth responded, “No.”
Roth was a seasoned Twitter user who assisted in guiding the social media platform through a number of pivotal decisions, such as the decision to permanently suspend its most well-known user, former U.S. President Donald Trump, last year.
His departure also alarmed advertisers, who abandoned Twitter in large numbers after Musk fired half the team, including employees in charge of content moderation.
Approximately 2,200 workers worldwide were devoted to content moderation duties at Twitter before Musk took over as CEO, according to Roth. He claimed that following the takeover, the corporate directory had been disabled, therefore he was unable to recall the number.
Roth claimed this as the reason for his resignation: under Musk, Twitter started to deviate from its adherence to established and publicly visible policies in favour of content decisions made alone by Musk.
“One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy … there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do,” he said.
According to Roth, the trust and safety team had sent warnings and recommendations before the revamped Twitter Blue premium subscription, which would have allowed users to pay for a verified checkmark on their accounts, began.
Spammers posing as prominent publicly traded corporations including Eli Lilly, Nestle, and Lockheed Martin quickly attacked the launch.
In addition, Roth claimed on Tuesday that Twitter made a mistake by limiting the distribution of a New York Post article that contained allegations about Joe Biden’s son, a then-Democratic presidential candidate. This was done just before the 2020 election.
He did, however, support Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Trump due to the possibility of further inciting violence following the brawl at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“We saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off,” Roth said. “We saw people dead in the Capitol.”
On November 19, Musk announced that Trump’s account would be restored after a narrow majority of respondents to a surprise Twitter poll approved of the action.
