Three members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council resigned this week, citing concerns that “the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, Anne Collier, and Lesley Podesta all left the council on Thursday.
Rahman served on the council’s Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention advisory group and Collier had been serving on the council’s Online Safety and Harassment Prevention group. Both had been members of the council since its inception in 2016.
According to Twitter, its Trust and Safety Council is a group of independent experts and organizations from around the world that “advocate for safety and advise us as we develop our products, programs, and rules.”
“I have watched with, dare I say, trepidation, the negotiations over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter,” Rahman said in a statement about her resignation. “I had written down some commitments to myself at the time. Should Musk step over those thresholds, I told myself I would resign. Those red lines have been crossed.”
Rahman cited claims by the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate that racial and sexual slurs had increased significantly on Twitter since Musk took over.
Rahman, Collier, and Podesta aren’t the first employees who oversaw safety issues at Twitter to quit. In November, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, left the company after just two weeks under Musk’s leadership.
Musk maintains that Twitter’s new policy “is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.”
He added that hate speech is actually down on the platform.
“Hate speech impressions (# of times tweet was viewed) continue to decline, despite significant user growth! @TwitterSafety will publish data weekly. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity.”
In addition, Musk has initiated a series of Twitter threads called the “Twitter Files,” in which he releases internal documents alleged to show freedom of speech being squashed in the past. So far, Musk has released portions of the files to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk posted on Nov. 28. “The public deserves to know what really happened.”
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Joe Gomez is an award-winning journalist who has worked across the globe for several major networks including: CBS, CNN, FOX News, and most recently NBC News Radio as a national correspondent based out of Washington. He has covered major disasters and worked as an investigative reporter in many danger zones.
