The Trust and Safety Council, a coalition of around 100 independent civil rights, human rights, and other groups that Twitter founded in 2016 to address issues including hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm, and other issues on the platform, has been disbanded by Elon Musk’s firm.
Council and Twitter official meeting
On Monday night, the council was supposed to meet with Twitter officials. However, according to some participants, Twitter told the group through email that it was dissolving it just before the scheduled meeting.
The council members talked to The Associated Press under the condition of anonymity because of concern for reprisal. They supplied screenshots of the email via Twitter. The council is “not the appropriate structure to achieve this,” according to the email, which stated that Twitter was “reevaluating how best to introduce external perspectives.”
The email, which was signed “Twitter,” stated that “our effort to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving quicker and more aggressively than ever before, and we will continue to encourage your thoughts moving forward about how to achieve this aim.”
The volunteer committee offered knowledge and recommendations on how Twitter should more effectively tackle hatred, abuse, and other ills, but it lacked any formal ability to make decisions and didn’t look into individual content disputes. Mr. Musk first stated he would create a new “content moderation committee” to assist in making big choices shortly after purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in late October, but he then altered his mind.
Council member Alex Holmes tweeted, “Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when approached by Twitter personnel to provide advice on a wide variety of online abuses and safety problems.” There was never a governing body or decision-making involved.
San Francisco-based Twitter, which confirmed the meeting with the council on Thursday, promised an “open dialogue and Q&A” with staff members, including the newly appointed director of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.
When occurred on the same day that three council members submitted a public letter on Twitter informing the public that they were leaving and asserting that, “contrary to Elon Musk’s statements, the safety and wellness of Twitter’s users are declining.”
After Mr. Musk increased criticism of them and the previous leadership of Twitter for supposedly not doing more to eliminate child sexual exploitation on the network, those former council members immediately became the subject of online abuse.
“Their years-long defiance of taking action against child abuse is a crime!” Musk posted a tweet.
Some of the council’s surviving members were concerned about the increasing number of assaults on it and demanded that Twitter cease misrepresenting the council’s function in an email written to the business earlier on Monday.
The email said that the false allegations made by Twitter leaders were “endangering current and past Council members.”
One of the advisory groups for the Trust and Safety Council was dedicated to preventing child exploitation. This included YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need, the Rati Foundation, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
