Democrats Freakout Over Elon Musk’s Twitter Changes

Elon Musk has restricted Twitter workers’ access to content filtering tools in his first week as CEO, promising a drastic shift in censorship policy. Predictably, the media is saying that the sky is falling.

According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s Twitter has restricted some employees’ access to tools used to enforce the social media site’s content moderation guidelines, limiting employees’ ability to remove posts, ban accounts, and engage in other acts of censorship, which “curbs the staff’s ability to crackdown on misinformation before a major U.S. election.”

Bloomberg reports:

“According to people familiar with the situation, most people in Twitter’s Safety and Trust organization are unable to change or penalize accounts that violate rules governing misinformation, offensive posts, and hate speech, with the exception of the most serious violations involving real-world harm. They stated that certain posts were targeted for manual enforcement.”

“According to two of the workers, personnel who were on call to police Twitter’s regulations during Brazil’s presidential election did receive access to the tools on Sunday, but only in a limited capacity. According to one source, the firm is still using automated enforcement technologies and third-party contractors, albeit the most serious breaches are routinely examined by Twitter staff.”

Rolling Stone expressed fear that the social media business, which fired CEO Parag Agrawal as well as “trust & safety” arch-censor Vijaya Gaddein in some of Musk’s first moves, could not be able to successfully intervene in the midterm elections.

“The abrupt change in content moderation may have an impact on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team’s capacity to both enforce and monitor moderation regulations ahead of the U.S. midterm election on Nov. 8,” Charisma Madarang wrote.

The story was picked up by Time, which ran the title “Twitter Limits The Content Moderation Tools Prior to Midterm Elections.”

To the media, it is no longer a surprise that social media companies will increase censorship and meddling in the run-up to an election.

Yoel Roth, a liberal Twitter holdout who had called Trump a “racist tangerine” and railed about “ACTUAL NAZIS LIVING IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” but who now has Musk’s support, sought to calm the media’s anxieties.

“This is precisely what we (or any corporation) should be doing throughout a corporate change to prevent insider risk. We are still enforcing our policies at scale,” tweeted Roth, who oversees Twitter’s “safety & integrity” team.