Twitter is caught by pins, and the EU is not amused. European authorities are concerned about the growing spread of inappropriate content – including pornographic images and videos – and protected by intellectual property rights on the social network, and attribute the lack of control to recent waves of layoffs at the company. The lack of engineers has caused the control mechanisms of the content published on the platform to be at a minimum. The result: an ideal wasteland for trolls and pirates to roam free.
Twitter suffered its second global outage in just a week on Monday, providing a clear indication of the lack of security measures. Former company workers have warned that the layoffs not only affect the stability of the platform, but also the moderation of content. Speaking to the BBC, the former head of content design explained that all of her team members were fired.
Elon Musk’s idea is for the platform to self-regulate the content it publishes, using artificial intelligence to detect violations of the rules and volunteer users to help monitor online content. But this is not enough for the EU, which has urged the magnate to hire more human moderators and fact checkers to review the posts, the Financial Times reported today.
EU demands complicate the plans of Musk, who is determined to make viable the company that he acquired last October for 44,000 million dollars in October. The main measure that he has taken so far to achieve this is to lay off the vast majority of the workforce, more than 7,500 employees worldwide. Among them, entire teams dedicated to content moderation.
According to the Financial Times, Twitter currently does not have workers dedicated to verifying the content that is published. Consequently, flagrant violations of the social network’s own rules are not being detected, leaving the way free for campaigns of disinformation, harassment and operations aimed at curbing freedom of expression. There has also been a 69% increase in new accounts with misogynistic and abusive profiles, according to statements to the BBC by the former head of Twitter content design.