Jon Bell, a former designer worked on Twitter’s anti-abuse team, saying that weakening Twitter’s censorship would be a mistake. Outsiders — including Bell before he joined the company — often don’t realize how much it needs to be done to keep the site from being overwhelmed by malicious content, he says. While Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent abuse and harassment, it has developed tools and processes that greatly reduce volume, Bell said. “Everything Musk is talking about is going to erase that.”
In 2016, Twitter established Council of Independent Organizations to provide advice on online safety. Alex Holmes, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the British non-profit organization that presents the Diana Prize, which is a member of the panel, said he is not sure how that work can continue. “Understandably, there are concerns that this could happen if freedom of expression were to be prioritized to an adverse degree,” he said. Holmes said he had heard similar concerns from Twitter employees.
Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and president of GLAAD, a nonprofit promoting LGBTQ rights and a member of Twitter’s advisory board, tweeted on Monday that Musk’s ownership makes her “worried about the LGBTQ community’s online safety.”
Brianna Wu, a game developer and software engineer who is in contact with Twitter’s Trust and Safety team through 2020, says Musk will advocate for women and others targeted on Twitter. this platform is “stupid”. online harassment campaign called Gamergate in 2014. “He’s a billionaire version of the true troll.”
After Twitter took action against her trolls, Wu continued to document harassment on the platform, especially against women and members of marginalized communities, to share. with Twitter.
Wu said she never understood that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team made decisions motivated by politics, a statement be hit at the platform by some of its critics. “They had a version of their product that wasn’t good for users, and they were trying to figure out how to make it better,” says Wu.
By treating the company as private, Musk would also remove the accountability that a board of directors and shareholders might bring to a publicly traded company. Activist investors have previously filed resolutions to try to push Twitter and other social media companies toward goals like stronger censorship policies and more user-friendly operations environment.
Andrew Behar, CEO of the nonprofit organization As You Sow, which represents a group of activist shareholders Twitter, said Twitter under Musk will likely look like Meta (formerly Facebook) under Mark Zuckerberg.
“You have a person in charge. Mark Zuckerberg makes all the decisions. No matter which solution you come up with, he has a 10 to 1 voting preference,” Behar said. “There is a lot of danger when you have all the power isolated in someone like Zuckerberg. Now we have that with Twitter. ”
Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, a boutique investment firm that owns Twitter stock, said she worries that even if Musk owns Twitter, it won’t get his full attention. “Twitter is too important to be a hobby,” she said.
Lamb said Arjuna is unlikely to vote in favor of the purchase. “I think he is an excellent engineer,” she said. “I’m not sure he’s a civil rights expert. I don’t think he’s an expert on free speech.”
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