Elon Musk’s twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council. Three members of the council resigned days earlier, stating that the safety and well-being of Twitter users is in decline.
The Washington Post reports on Monday that Twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council. The company sent an email to its board members saying: “As Twitter enters a new phase, it is reevaluating how best we can bring external insight into our product development and policy development work. We have concluded that the Trust and Safety Council are not the best structures to accomplish this.
The email states that the email also thanks the recipients for their collaboration and advice over the years. It comes days after three board members announced their resignations, saying that “it is evident from research evidence that, contrary Elon Musk’s claims, the safety of Twitter users is on the decline.”
According to one council member, Twitter is destroying the “years worth of institutional memory that we as council members have brought” to the company. They added that “having external experts and advocates look at your services makes it smarter.”
ConnectSafely’s chief executive Larry Magid said that he was fired rather than quit. Elon doesn’t like criticism and he doesn’t want to get the type of advice that a safety advisory council would give him. This would probably tell him to rehire some staff members he lost and to reinstate some rules he lost and take the company in a different direction than he’s currently taking it.
Despite the exalted statements of the Trust and Safety Council, the company did a horrible job in stopping child pornography appearing on the platform. Their inability to stop illegal material led to the company changing its business plans.
Twitter was reportedly considering allowing porn stars via an OnlyFans subscription feature to monetize their adult content, but it was quickly scrapped by internal teams who discovered that Twitter is unable to effectively enforce child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
According to The Verge, Twitter had a new revenue idea earlier in the year. It was creating a subscription service for pornography via its platform called OnlyFans. To “pressure-test” the decision to allow adult creators on Twitter to monetize on its platform, the company quickly assembled a team known as the “Red Team”. This team focuses on what it would be like for Twitter to do so safely and responsibly.
The Red Team discovered an obstacle quickly — Twitter is unable allow porn artists to sell subscriptions because it is still unable effectively to police sexually harmful content on its platform, including child abuse material.
