Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, claimed on Tuesday that Elon Musk, the company’s new owner and CEO, had not made the microblogging network any safer. Roth, who departed Twitter two weeks after Musk became CEO, asserted that he doesn’t think the business has enough staff remaining to adequately govern the platform. When it comes to that, Roth remarked at a recent Knight Foundation meeting, “You can’t rest on your laurels.” “It cannot be automated. When it comes to trust and safety, there is no such thing as “set it and forget it.””
The most recent assertions made by Roth contradict his earlier ones. He had before claimed that Musk had made Twitter a safer place.
Roth attributed some of his optimism regarding the platform’s safety to his team’s successful management of a trolling campaign earlier this month. However, he ultimately made the decision to depart the organisation as a result of a “procedural legitimacy” collapse. While Musk had expressed a desire to establish a “moderation council” before making significant policy decisions at Twitter, the CEO, according to him, demonstrated that he would prefer to make decisions alone.
Roth also brought up the poorly executed launch of Twitter Blue and sponsored verification. He claimed that despite his team’s warnings to Musk that con artists would take advantage of the paid verification service, Musk disregarded their worries. Roth stated, “There weren’t the safeguards that needed to be in place to handle it upfront, and it went exactly off the tracks in the way that we anticipated.”
When Musk became CEO, he opened up the option for any Twitter user to pay $8 per month for a verified checkmark. After users used their verified checkmarks to pose as organisations and politicians and publish offensive content, Twitter paused the verification service. According to Musk’s most recent comments, the checkmark programme may make a tentative comeback later this week. Musk added that each validated user will need to be carefully vetted before the checkmark appears.
Users should keep an eye on whether crucial safety features like blocking, muting, and protected tweets continue to operate as intended, advised Roth. He advised people to leave if protected tweets stopped operating since that was a sign that something was seriously wrong.
