Twitter is not safer under Elon Musk – and he has made ‘alarming changes’ to site, former exec warns
Twitter is not safer under its new owner Elon Musk, according to the platform’s former head of trust and safety.
Yoel Roth resigned from the social networking site earlier this month – and said the site had started to stray from adhering to publicly available policies towards decisions made by Mr Musk alone.
“One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy… there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do.”
Many of the changes Mr Musk has made have been “sudden and alarming for employees and users alike”, Mr Roth said in a New York Times opinion piece soon after his resignation.
The Tesla billionaire laid off roughly half of the company’s 8,000 workers– a move that hit 15% of the trust and safety department, Mr Roth had tweeted at the time.
Mr Musk’s ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter’s verification system allowed users to pay for a verified tick on their account – something Mr Roth said was done despite warnings and advice from the trust and safety team.
Soon afterwards, the platform became a playground for spammers impersonating companies such as Nestle and Lockheed Martin.
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Mr Roth also defended Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump from the site after the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January last year, citing the risk of further incitement of violence.
He said: “We saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off.
“We saw people dead in the Capitol.”
But Mr Musk tweeted on 19 November that Mr Trump’s account would be reinstated, after running a surprise Twitter poll which saw a slim majority vote in favour of the move.
