Elon Musk faces a test of how to manage disinformation and hate speech on Twitter as the United States votes in the midterm elections, days after the billionaire fired officials who policed user content.
Critics had already voiced concerns about Musk’s intention to reduce content moderation at his newly acquired social media company when he began implementing a plan to lay off half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce, including members of the “trust and safety” team.
Then on Saturday, Twitter said in updates to its App Store app that it was rolling out a new subscription service in some places, including the US and UK, charging users $7.99 a month (R $41) for a product that would include “Blue Tick” checks. “You can curse me all day but it will cost $8,” Musk tweeted on his personal verified account.
The measures take place before the elections on Tuesday (8) that will decide the control of Congress.
Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, faces a number of challenges as he tries to overhaul Twitter’s business model, including paying $1 billion in annual interest on its $13 billion in debt. billion (R$ 66.1 billion), litigation by former employees and a possible legal dispute with former executives.
Major brands also suspended advertising on the platform out of fears that Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, would slow down on content moderation.
That put Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and security, in the spotlight and one of the few execs from the previous administration who remain in the role. Roth said in a tweet Friday that the job cuts affected about 15% of the trust and safety team, “with our frontline moderation team experiencing the least impact.” He added, “Our core moderation features remain in place.”
However, Chris Krebs, former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a tweet over the weekend that the new subscription model for verified profiles is part of the product launch. Musk’s “Twitter Blue” was a “big risk” ahead of elections, during which the “source of information is critical”.
He described the new model of verifying users’ identities as Twitter “taking your money and your word”.
Edward Perez, Twitter’s former director of product management whose team focused on coverage of the elections, said in a tweet that the verification scheme was “a clash between making money and validating authenticity.” […] Rushing this days before the election is a bad idea.”
Responding to concerns about the verification system, Musk said Sunday that “any Twitter account that makes a caricature without clearly specifying the ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”
He added: “Previously, we issued a warning prior to suspension, but now that we are rolling out generalized verification there will be no warning. This will be clearly identified as a condition of signing up for Twitter Blue.”
On Sunday, The New York Times quoted sources as saying that Twitter would delay the rollout of the new verification system until the day after the election. A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk suggested more reforms for Twitter users over the weekend, including changing the site’s search function; the ability to attach long texts to tweets, which are limited to 240 characters; and the introduction of “creator monetization”, which could allow users with large followings to earn money from their content.
However, he faces a battle to convince big brands like General Motors, Mondelez, Carlsberg, Volkswagen and General Mills to resume advertising on the platform, which relies on ads for most of its revenue, after companies suspended marketing for concerns about content moderation.
Musk will also have to mitigate the fallout of cutting roughly half of the company’s workforce as he tries to shore up Twitter’s finances to meet $1 billion annual interest payments on debt that helped him finance the company’s takeover. , for US$ 44 billion.
Those laid off received an email to their personal address and had access to the company’s email and channels of the internal Slack application canceled.
“Regarding Twitter’s waning strength, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing more than $4 million a day,” Musk wrote on the platform.
Those who remained received a corporate email message saying they “were not impacted by the workforce reduction.” While the exact wording varied by location, employees were told that Musk was busy meeting employees, users, policymakers and partners, and would soon be communicating his “vision” to them.
Most teams, like policy, have been halved, according to people familiar with the situation. Others, including communications, human rights and the machine learning ethics team, have been laid off, former employees said, leaving only a handful of them.
Five former employees filed a class-action suit against Twitter in federal court in San Francisco late last week, claiming they did not receive sufficient notice under federal and California law that they would lose their jobs.
Musk could also face litigation because he terminated contracts with several senior executives, such as Parag Agrawal, the chief executive, and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy and trust, “for cause,” two people briefed on the situation said, which means that he claimed to have valid legal justification for doing so, and therefore damages may be void.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
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