<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/05/npr-was-twitters-example-of-what-should-not-be-labeled-state-affiliated-media-then-musk-added-the-label-and-retconned-the-policy/>
"For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety
thinks that it’s easy: just do what /I/ would do. The assumption is that
there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is
that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable
arguments for a wide variety of possible ways to handle things. This is why
good trust & safety teams focus on trying to craft clear policies that can be
followed by a large distributed team, while realizing that there will be many
difficult calls that don’t fit neatly. In those cases, the teams have to make a
tough call, or consider whether or not the policies themselves need to be
adjusted.
It’s not an easy job at all. And while it’s easy to criticize the mistakes that
are made, as long as there’s a clear process based on articulated policies, I
think you can
criticize decisions you disagree with without assuming
ill-intent. Unfortunately, many people immediately leap to the idea of
ill-intent.
Indeed, Elon Musk made it clear from early on that a key reason for buying
Twitter was that he did not approve of the way that Twitter handled trust &
safety, falsely insisting that it was driven by a “woke” agenda when the
reality, as has been shown time and time again, is that they were just trying
to stop people from being assholes on the platform. Throughout the Twitter
Files, we’ve seen over and over that Twitter’s trust & safety team struggled
with difficult calls (and sometimes made mistakes), but focused on principled
positions rather than being driven by their personal beliefs or politics.
However, since Elon came to town, he’s changed the trust & safety process to
have one guiding principle: things Elon doesn’t like get punished. Things he
doesn’t care about, don’t. The entirety of the working policy at Twitter right
now seems to be soothing Elon’s massive ego."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
