Unraveling years of work, Elon Musk abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, putting the well-being of Twitter users at risk.
Less than an hour before the members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council were to meet, they received an email with the subject line, “Thank You,” that informed them the council was no longer “the best structure” to bring “external insights into our product and policy development work,” according to the Washington Post.
“Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues,” tweeted council member Alex Holmes. “At no point was it a governing body or decision making.”
The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment, and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes, reports the Associated Press.
Last week, three members of the Trust and Safety Council resigned, warning that the “safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”
The former head of the Trust and Safety Council, Yoel Roth, resigned from the social media company in November. While Musk had initially been publicly supportive of Roth, that soon changed after he left the company.
In recent weeks, reports CNN News, Roth has been bombarded with a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files,” internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.
By the weekend, criticism and threats against Roth escalated to the point that he fled his home. Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.
Musk’s tweets about Roth recalled the QAnon conspiracy movement, which claims incorrectly that Democratic Party leaders direct a child sex abuse network.
A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory.
However, the Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation, and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.
