There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, it was that it's more resistant to censorship than Twitter is (particularly government censorship).
Having large community spaces where everyone interacts might be a worthy goal, but those spaces are often going to require a larger degree of moderation and policing to stay civil. It's a tradeoff that (as far as I can tell) Musk doesn't seem to advocate for -- his policy seems to be that people should block/mute whatever they disagree with, and the platform shouldn't make that decision for them. If that's someone's approach to free speech and they want individual or small-group control rather than platform-wide standards, then Mastodon is a pretty interesting implementation of that idea.
Compare this with something like HN -- there's one feed for everyone and limited blocking tools. That forces everyone to interact with each other, but also means that HN mods and users are both a lot more involved in debating what stories are allowed and how discourse is conducted, and those decisions impact more of the community when they're made.
Seems like a large percentage of that team was former employees of the government, former FBI agents, former DOJ, etc. or have close familial ties to active government agents
If that is who you hire to "push" back against the government then you are not going to get much push back, it seems to me (and many others) Twitter was not forming teams to resist government influence but to deepen it.
I think gutting the teams was the correct move
If you don't trust the previous teams, then fire them and hire new people. Firing these teams and leaving them gutted was definitely not the correct move. If you're worried about the effectiveness of your current fire department, the solution is not to stop having a fire department, it's to get a better one.
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Going after the legal team in particular is a little strange, because you can call out Twitter's upper management, moderation teams, and policy stakeholders as lacking nuance/neutrality, but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room. They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.
If there was any team you were going to keep to help you push back against government requests, it probably would have been the lawyers.
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But it goes back to -- it doesn't seem like Musk is actually interested in building effective structures to support free speech, it seems like his interest begins and ends with complaining about the existing structures. Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.
Personally I think the platform is better today. The most "journalist" scream about it being unsafe the more I believe Elon is doing a great job, because I do not trust anyone at Washington Post, NyTimes, NBC, CBS, CNN, or any other major main stream propaganda source, and I trust even less their politically baised "research" non-profits.
>but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room.
No they were not, the most recent one fired was literally former FBI. Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". they are for "free speech" the same way the modern ACLU is, only if you have the "correct" speech
>>They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.
Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.
>>Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.
If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM, instead were more worried about suppressing political speech and carrying the water for one political party.
Because Twitter's staff numbers are public? What are you talking about, are you going to try and claim that Twitter has the same number of moderators now that it used to? It doesn't.
This is not something that's debatable, Twitter's moderation teams today are smaller than they were before he took over the company.
> Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". [...] Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.
It's a heck of a lot more practical and useful than just complaining about it. They did what lawyers are supposed to do, they showed up in court and defended free speech rights.
Twitter's lawyers took on government cases and challenged police orders that other social media companies would have rolled over and accepted -- in particular around the right to anonymity and parody. This is important foundational stuff that free speech rights online are built on.
But again, if Musk disagrees, more power to him. It's not a problem for Musk to hire different lawyers, the problem is that he hasn't really done that. The most he's done is brought over some lawyers from Tesla that are essentially doing double-duty now, but he doesn't seem to have built a legal team that's centered around specifically defending free speech rights for users or challenging government requests.
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> If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Musk makes a big deal about this stuff, but he has literally just gutted these teams. There are way fewer moderators right now on Twitter looking for CSAM, and Musk is leaning into automated/contracted moderation to try and fill in the gaps -- which pretty much everyone dealing with child safety agrees is not a sufficient approach for this kind of moderation. He's dropped CSAM teams for some countries down to the single-digits of workers.
Musk has criticisms about the amount of resources that Twitter was devoting to CSAM. But his response isn't to increase those resources. His policy seems to be that if you say something is important, it just magically gets better because you say you care about it. But it doesn't, you have to actually put work into it and devote resources to making it better.
The CSAM example is just so wild to me, because it's such a clear example of Musk criticizing Twitter for something and then doubling down and doing the same thing to an even greater degree.
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> Personally I think the platform is better today.
Good for you, but this is a wildly simplistic take on free speech. It undermines legitimate conversations about real problems Twitter had with moderation in the past to simplify the issue down to "he banned some journalists I don't like and let some right-wing people back on the platform."
Structurally, he's not really doing anything. He's just gutting teams and complaining about the way they used to run.
Where? that was true when they were a public company and such things were part of the Investor reports, and SEC filings, but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore.
>>This is not something that's debatable
Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue
>Twitter's moderation teams today are smaller than they were before he took over the company.
The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams. I think there was ALOT of babysitting jobs at pre-elon twitter, people not doing a whole lot of actual work, i.e Wine on Tap, meditation rooms, etc like the "day in the life" videos showed
I am sure they were having alot of meetings about doing work, but very little work being done
>>They did what lawyers are supposed to do, they showed up in court
would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers?
>>Twitter's lawyers took on government cases and challenged police orders that other social media companies would have rolled over and accepted
This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team. I will fully admit I am biased agaist them because clearly did not like or want to have people like me speaking on the platform. I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things
to me they were a net negative for free expression, I am sure you disagree simply because the speech you like was not suppressed, and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was.
>but he has literally just gutted these teams
That is actually false, there were separate teams dealing with moderation, CSAM was not under the same team, he infact gutted the other teams and expanded the resources for the people working on CSAM.
Twitter has publicly laid off about 75% of its staff fairly evenly across the entire company. We don't have exact counts of employees, but we know how many employees the company used to have, and we know roughly how many were fired.
So now look at job postings; has Twitter put out calls to hire thousands of moderators to replace those people? No.
> Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue
Sure, whatever, you can debate anything you'd like. But you're going to have a hard time getting people to humor you or take you seriously. If your argument is that actually Twitter hasn't slashed its staff and there are tons of moderators and that all of the reports about it are false, then you're not arguing a coherent enough position to take seriously.
> The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams.
When you are doing human moderation specifically, raw numbers matter. A human being can only physically review a finite number of abuse reports a day, and as they are stretched more and as they are pressured to make faster decisions, their accuracy goes down. This is generally agreed on by pretty much everyone -- which is exactly why Twitter was criticized in the past for its moderation approaches.
Twitter's moderation teams (which were heavily reliant on contractors who didn't get the perks you're talking about in the first place) were understaffed before Elon took over. The article we are talking under directly calls this out as a problem.
So no, you can't fire most of those people and not replace them and expect the remaining people to be better at moderation, it just doesn't work that way. Human moderation means that at some point in the process, a human being needs to physically look at the content being reported and make an informed decision. That requires raw numbers.
> would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers?
Twitter's legal team did often show up to court. Why do you think I'm praising them? Yes, I know that many legal teams in corporations don't get involved in actual cases that often, that's why Twitter's legal team deserves some level of praise for being different.
> This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team.
Twitter's legal team was not perfect, but they were uncharacteristically aggressive about preserving anonymity compared to other social media companies. I'm not talking about just taking objections to the government, Twitter's legal team has literally sued the government on behalf of individual users before.
Again, not perfect. But noticeably aggressive about this stuff beyond what many of their competitors were doing.
> and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was. [...] I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things
I feel like you're conflating Twitter's legal team with every single other team on the platform? Do you think that Twitter's lawyers were specifically responsible for every bad moderation decision that the company made? Twitter's lawyers were not in charge of hiring moderators or deciding what resources they would get. They weren't in charge of deciding Twitter's overall moderation direction, you are thinking of management and heads of safety.
Once again, you don't have to like Twitter's legal team. Are you able to recognize that regardless of whether or not you like the legal team Twitter used to have, it is still important for free speech that Twitter have a proactive legal team today that isn't jumping between multiple companies? The problem isn't that Musk people fired people, the problem is that he didn't follow that up by hiring.
I don't particularly care if Musk feels good about existing staff. It's just foolish for his followup to firing people not to be to bring in qualified replacements.
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> That is actually false
It is actually not. Twitter's overall moderation teams are smaller than than they used to be, and that has included the dissolving (and near-dissolving) of specific CSAM teams, and severing ties with a ton of contractors. Now, I'm sure that Musk would argue he's just merged teams together or given people shared responsibilities. But I will point out that doubling up responsibilities for CSAM moderation teams is also stretching them thin.
You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. Who has been hired to replace the heads of child safety that were fired? What contractors have been brought in to replace the contractors that Twitter severed ties with? You don't think Musk would be bragging about those job postings and hires if they existed?
As a piece of history, Twitter tried to launch an OnlyFans competitor in pre-Musk days and the project was scrapped in part because Twitter acknowledged internally at the time that it did not have resources to do CSAM moderating at the scale necessary to support that platform. Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators specifically for handling CSAM, that problem hasn't changed.
Shuffling people around wouldn't be enough to fix that problem even if Musk had the people available to shuffle around. Which to be clear, he literally doesn't, Twitter's employee count across the board including its moderation teams is a fraction of what it used to be.
No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over, and previous twitter exec turned a blind eye to the issue ignoring both internal and external sources while they focused on banning wrong think
>>Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators
I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators.
Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin [1], current head of trust and safety where she specifically before Elon "were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding." Or the Account of @elizableu where she as chronicled the rapid improvements Elon has brought to this subject.
it is not a matter of my personal preference, I trust the people on the ground, not the media.
[1] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216
Which experts and how is this being measured? Because I can't find sources that confirm that claim: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon...
Do you have ANY actual numbers to back that up, at all? Let alone numbers measured by independent experts and not just filtered through Twitter PR?
> I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators.
I don't know how to get across to you that human moderation requires humans.
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> Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin
That Elon's current head of safety is praising him isn't surprising -- one thing we've all learned from the way he's run Twitter is that you don't get to work for Elon at all unless you're pretty proactive about praising him.
But there have been zero independent measurements that confirm these claims, and actual experts in the field (read, not just a current employee and a couple fan/activist accounts) are concerned about the direction the platform is going and about the lack of investment in moderation teams.
But since those experts talking to journalists and not just posting to Twitter, maybe it doesn't matter what they think /s.
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These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong.
Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account.
And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems.
But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation.
Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s
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The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution.
There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things.
You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.