Twitter ‘moves fast on moderation’ as harmful posts rise

Head of trust and safety says platform focusing more on automation instead of human reviews

Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favouring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety has said.

Twitter was also more aggressively restricting abuse-prone hashtags and search results in areas including child exploitation, regardless of potential impacts on “benign uses” of those terms, said Twitter vice-president of trust and safety product Ella Irwin.

“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” Irwin said, in the first interview a Twitter executive had given since Musk’s acquisition of the social media company in late October.

Her comments come as researchers are reporting a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk announced an amnesty for accounts suspended under Twitter’s previous leadership that had not broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam”.

The company has faced pointed questions about its ability and willingness to moderate harmful and illegal content since Musk slashed half of Twitter’s staff and issued an ultimatum to work long hours that resulted in the loss of hundreds more employees.

On Friday, Musk vowed “significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech” in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Irwin said Musk encouraged the team to worry less about how their actions would affect user growth or revenue, saying safety was the company’s top priority. “He emphasises that every single day, multiple times a day.”

The approach to safety Irwin described at least in part reflected an acceleration of changes that were already being planned since 2021 around Twitter’s handling of hateful conduct and other policy violations, according to ex-employees familiar with that work.

One approach, captured in the industry mantra “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach”, entails leaving up certain tweets that violate the company’s policies but barring them from appearing in places like the home timeline and search.

Twitter has long deployed such “visibility filtering” tools around misinformation and had already incorporated them into its hateful conduct policy before the Musk acquisition. The approach allows for more freewheeling speech while cutting down on the potential harms associated with viral abusive content.

The number of tweets containing hateful content rose sharply in the week before Musk tweeted on November 23 that impressions, or views, of hateful speech were declining, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate – in one example of researchers pointing to the prevalence of such content, while Musk touts a reduction in visibility.

Irwin, who previously held safety roles at other firms including Amazon and Google, pushed back on suggestions that Twitter did not have the resources or willingness to protect the platform.

She said lay-offs did not significantly impact full-time employees or contractors working on what the company referred to as its “Health” divisions, including in “critical areas” like child safety and content moderation.

Two sources familiar with the cuts said more than 50 per cent of the Health engineering unit was laid off. Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the assertion.

Irwin said Musk was focused on using automation more, arguing the company had in the past erred on the side of using timeand labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content.

“He’s encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe,” she said.

Twitter is also restricting hashtags and search results frequently associated with abuse, like those aimed at looking up “teen” pornography. Past concerns about the impact of such restrictions on permitted uses of the terms were gone, Irwin said.

[Elon Musk has] encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe

ELLA IRWIN, TWITTER EXECUTIVE