Twitter has disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, which was formerly implemented to combat hate speech on the platform.
Key Details
- Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, comprised of civil society groups, has recently been disbanded.
- The council was composed of around 100 civil, human rights, and other organization members that were brought together to help fight hate speech, child exploitation, self-harm, and other issues on the platform.
- The council was set to meet with other representatives of the platform before abruptly being dismissed before the meeting.
- Twitter disbanded the council because it didn’t fit into the platform’s new structure.
Why it’s news
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter on October 27, his goal was to make the platform a space for free speech.
Considering Twitter has 240 million active users, many investors were worried that enabling a platform of that size to allow free speech that hate speech was soon to follow, causing many investors to pull from the platform.
Musk has since begged advertisers to rejoin the platform, even offering incentives to put money back into Twitter, alleging that the platform has less hate speech than ever before.
In an unforeseen step, Musk has now dismantled Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which was put into place in 2016 to fight against hate speech and other issues on the site.
The council was set to meet with other platform representatives before receiving an email detailing that the council was to be dismantled.
“As Twitter moves into a new phase, we are re-evaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this,” reads the email.
Twitter is working to move quickly to address inappropriate content, even if it means figuring out some specifics later, according to Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.
Twitter has not commented on the eradication, and it is unsure what the platform’s next step will be or if it plans to create another content moderation board similar to the Trust and Safety Council or something else entirely.