In a company email sent Monday night, Twitter stated that it was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work.” In the announcement to end its Trust and Safety Council, the email continued, “As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.”
The council was a department that some critics claimed engaged in disproportionate content moderation of certain political ideologies and individuals. A department that has been at the root of controversy, it was launched in 2016 and included “mostly left wing industry experts and organizations largely focused on restricting so-called hate speech” reports National Review.
“Original members included the Anti-Defamation League, Center for Democracy and Technology, Dangerous Speech Project, Feminist Frequency, Love 146, NetSafe, Samaritans, the Wahid Institute, and others.”
The former global head of the Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, was in charge of the team responsible for burying the New York Post’s expose of the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell.
Roth also was involved in a secret shadow-banning group called “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support.” The group censored multiple conservative groups and individuals.
“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” a company email obtained by the Associated Press read.
According to CNN, a page on Twitter’s website which has been deleted, noted that the council dealt with “child sexual exploitation, suicide prevention, online safety, and tackling other problematic phenomena on the internet.”
Musk has long been at odds with the group. Ella Irwin, head of Trust and Safety since November, stated, “For now, I think we are biasing towards moving quickly and figuring out the details in some of these areas after,” she said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
After three council members announced they were stepping down and criticized Musk for allegedly neglecting combatting dangerous content, including that which could fuel child exploitation, Musk responded on Twitter: “It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!”