Censors losing grip on Twitter content

 PJ Media:

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made another move to prevent viewpoint discrimination while he sorts out the dumpster fire known as Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” department. Bloomberg reports that employees got locked out of some internal tools used for content moderation:

Twitter Inc., the social network being overhauled by new owner Elon Musk, has frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, curbing the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major US election.

Most people who work in Twitter’s Trust and Safety organization are currently unable to alter or penalize accounts that break rules around misleading information, offensive posts and hate speech, except for the most high-impact violations that would involve real-world harm, according to people familiar with the matter. Those posts were prioritized for manual enforcement, they said.

The important part of this news is not that employees lost access to the tools. Instead, it is the confirmation that prior management empowered Twitter employees to determine what constitutes “misinformation.”

Related: The Morning Briefing: New Twitter Is Full of Glorious Musk-Scented Liberal Tears

For those who have had a Twitter account limited, shadow banned, or suspended, the article provides another piece of data. According to the report, a Twitter employee banned you, not an algorithm. “Detection of policy breaches can either be flagged by other Twitter users or detected automatically, but taking action on them requires human input and access to the dashboard tools. Those tools have been suspended since last week, the people said.”

These same employees are very worried about their loss of power to correct your wrongthink:

The scaled-back content moderation has raised concerns among employees on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, who believe the company will be short-handed in enforcing policies in the run-up to the US midterm election on Nov. 8. Trust and Safety employees are often tasked with enforcing Twitter’s misinformation and civic integrity policies — many of the same policies that former President Donald Trump routinely violated before and after the 2020 elections, the company said at the time.

This entire paragraph is a study in ridiculousness. President Donald Trump primarily questioned the results of the 2020 election and pointed out obvious irregularities. If this truly violated Twitter’s “civic integrity policies,” Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and a host of other Democrats would no longer have a Twitter account. It is evident that it is only a civic offense if a Republican questions the victory of a Democrat. Additionally, people have been voting in the United States for nearly three centuries without the geniuses at Twitter deciding what information they are allowed to review. Amazingly, we functioned as a nation before Twitter’s censors were on the job.

...

Freedom of speech is already benefiting from Musk's Twitter takeover.  I hope he keeps it up. 

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