Elon Musk seems hellbent on destroying the social media platform he spent $44 billion to buy. His latest move is the dissolution of the company’s Trust and Safety Council, a worldwide group of more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions, formed in 2016, who for years have volunteered their time to ensure Twitter users “feel safe expressing themselves,” the website reads.
Council members were notified of the dissolution on Monday via an email signed simply, “Twitter,” The Washington Post reports.
One council member told the Post anonymously that disbanding the group was discarding “years of institutional memory that we on the council have brought. […] Getting external experts and advocates looking at your services makes you smarter.”
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Larry Magid, chief executive of ConnectSafely, a nonprofit organization based in Silicon Valley that focuses on educating people about Internet safety, said that members of the Council were poised to resign.
“By disbanding it, we got fired instead of quit. […] Elon doesn’t want criticism, and he really doesn’t want the kind of advice he would very likely get from a safety advisory council, which would likely tell him to rehire some of the staff he got rid of and reinstate some of the rules he got rid of and turn the company in another direction from where he is turning it.”
Per usual, Musk’s attacks on anyone who chooses to speak out against him result in counterattacks, often resulting in online harassment.
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, experienced his own fresh hell over the weekend after Musk intimated online that Roth’s academic writing about children was inappropriate
“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” Musk tweeted Saturday, with a screenshot of Roth’s dissertation attached.
This is a stark pivot from Musk’s previous comments about Roth—made before the former employee delivered his resignation.
“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted in October.
Roth, an openly gay man, was forced to flee his home over the weekend after an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ harassment following the release of what Musk called his “Twitter Files”—internal messages Musk released through journalists such as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and Die Welt’s Bari Weiss, CNN reports. The files include emails sent by Twitter employees related to limiting the reach of tweets about the Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy—a revelation so boring and useless that even avowed antisemite and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka couldn’t bring himself to care. “So far I’m deeply underwhelmed,” Gorka tweeted.
Roth was involved in discussions about former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account and whether to ban it or not.
Musk has indeed been busy over the last few days. Sunday night, he was invited onto the stage by comedian Dave Chappelle, only to be promptly booed by a crowd of 18,000.
This just hours after going on the attack with far-right COVID-19 conspiracy theories and a demand to "prosecute" government infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, Daily Kos’ Hunter writes.
On Monday, Musk tweeted, "The woke mind virus is either defeated, or nothing else matters." Clearly, the physical safety of former Twitter employees, politicians, and average users on the platform is of no concern to Musk. Their safety be damned if it means showing people the slightest bit of respect, using preferred pronouns, or sparing an ounce of kindness.
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