Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk has pledged the platform would not become a “hellscape,” but experts fear a staff exodus following mass layoffs might have devastated its ability to combat misinformation, impersonation and data theft.
Twitter devolved into what campaigners described as a cesspit of falsehoods and hate speech after layoffs last week cut half the firm’s 7,500 staff, and fake accounts proliferated following its botched rollout of a new verification system.
Further throwing the social media platform into disarray — and raising doubt about its very existence — reports said hundreds of employees on Thursday departed the company in defiance of an ultimatum from Musk.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The huge number of layoffs and resignations raises serious questions about content moderation and the security of user data,” said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, a big tech accountability advocate at nonprofit group Public Citizen. “It is imperative that [US regulators] act with urgency as users could have their sensitive data exploited or even stolen given the lack of sufficient staff that remain to adequately protect it.”
The hashtag #RIPTwitter gained huge traction on the platform after resignations poured in from employees who chose “no” to Musk’s demand that they either be “extremely hardcore” or exit the company.
Twitter has plunged into turmoil as Musk, a self-professed freedom of speech absolutist, seeks to shake up the money-losing company after his blockbuster US$44 billion buyout late last month.
Photo: AFP
The platform’s content moderation teams — largely outsourced contractors who combat misinformation — have been axed and a number of engineers have been fired after openly criticizing Musk on Twitter or on an internal messaging board, according to reports and Twitter posts.
Wary brands have paused or slowed down advertising spending — Twitter’s biggest revenue source — after a spike in racist and anti-Semitic trolling on the platform.
“Misinformation super spreaders” — or untrustworthy accounts peddling falsehoods — saw a 57 percent jump in engagement in the week after Musk’s acquisition, a survey by the nonprofit watchdog group NewsGuard showed.
“Elon Musk has swiftly decimated Twitter’s ability to maintain the platform’s integrity, health and safety,” said Jessica Gonzalez, cochief executive officer at the nonpartisan group Free Press. “If there is one lesson that all social media platforms must take away from this debacle, it’s that without protecting users from hate and lies you have no company at all.”
In a response to critics, Musk on Friday indicated a new direction for content moderation on Twitter.
While not being totally removed from the platform, Musk said that “negative/hate tweets” would be “max deboosted [and] 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 wrote.
However, his plan fell on skeptical ears.
“We could certainly see a spike in misinformation, hate speech and other objectionable content because of Musk’s latest moves,” New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics executive director Zeve Sanderson said. “Content moderation is a lot harder to do without people around to actually do content moderation.”
Potentially adding to the pressure is that Musk on Saturday restored the Twitter account of former US president Donald Trump, 22 months after he was suspended over the US Capitol riot by his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 US presidential election result.
In a letter to the US Federal Trade Commission, a group of Democratic US senators blamed Musk for introducing “alarming” new features that undermined safety despite warnings that they would be “abused for fraud, scams and dangerous impersonation.”
“Users are already facing the serious repercussions of this growth-at-all-costs strategy,” they wrote in the letter published on Thursday, noting a recent spike in fake accounts impersonating companies, politicians and celebrities.
Among the victims was drugmaker Eli Lilly, whose stock price nosedived — erasing billions of US dollar in market capitalization — after a parody account stamped with a verification tag purchased for US$8 tweeted that insulin was being made available for free.
Twitter last week disabled sign-ups for the contentious feature known as Twitter Blue, with reports saying it had been temporarily disabled to help address impersonation issues — but not before several brands took a hit.
Given the apparent vulnerabilities, digital experts have warned activists, particularly in autocratic countries, of the increased risk of identity theft or their private messages falling into the hands of hackers.
“Around the world, Twitter is used to organize against oppression,” Hunt-Majer said. “If Musk’s mismanagement kills it, that would be a significant blow to freedom of information and, frankly, human rights in general on a global scale.”
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
RSS