Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk Twitter's second head of trust and safety to serve under Elon Musk has departed with little explanation. Ella Irwin, who took over from Yoel Roth when he quit the company last November, confirmed her resignation to multiple news outlets late last night. Her role included overseeing content moderation at Twitter, an unenviable …
You care that much too keep watching? I only come for the snide comments and am looking forward to the inevitable rebranding before it finally gets shut down. I guess it may have one final hurrah in what promises to be a very polarising US election season (elections aren't until next year, but the games have already started). Although I think that the companies won't be making as much money with their nowtrage fuelled ads as they did a few years ago.
The problem is that some social media channels become political platforms or intentional social disruptors by third parties. Moderation enforcement makes social media political organizations. Effectively for very large social media It is not simply a moderation, it is a policing of country(s).
One solution it to break down large media companies into MANY smaller ones, and not allowing any social media to become larger than X-million users. Then allowing certain degree of diversity in moderation approaches similar to traditional print media. Pluralism is necessary for efficient political process.
Another approach is to allow (political) sub-networks within large social platforms with different moderation rules in each of them. Formulation of rules for each sub-net has to be done by KNOWN physical political representatives.
continuation...
Political correctness != legality.
Once a large social network becomes a set of communities with own moderation policies, community moderation groups can be set, similar to Stackoverflow. One community with more relaxed moderation rules can recommend content from less liberal communities, but not vice versa. The top level rules of a media platform should only moderate clearly illegal content. Community content should be moderated by their owners and members. Users are free to choose specific communities, but they must accept their rules before joining and getting recommended specific community content. Community moderators should be able to kick out new members breaking the rules, in the simplest case spam bots.
Such model is somewhat similar to US federal structure or Internet with diverse web-sites in general. In a way, this would be balcanization of social media. Examples of potential benefits for special groups: communities for children of different age groups, communities of art, political groups. Even country-based sub-nets are possible.
That doesn't actually work anywhere, because the mods turn the place into an echo chamber and happily let people spew misinformation, threats and dox people as long at is pro-people-they-like and anti-people-they-don't
Community moderation reduces the workload on the company by providing unpaid expert labor, but without external moderation to enforce both legal and community standards, any open community moderated forum in the current social landscape devolves rapidly into a collection of dumpster fires. And in a global internet, who's laws apply? Because if China gets to decide what is legal for people in Uganda to read in a forum, well, you get the problems.
This is why we are eyeballs deep in anti-vaxxers and q-anaon BS. Even the damn Scientologists are back at it. And plenty of jurisdictions have no or bad laws to cover those sorts of problems. So as many of the sites have found, a base rule allowing moderation of content that can cause actual harm or fraud, or spreading misinformation is a better tool.
And yeah, social media hate speech incites violence. You need to clamp it down before it incites a mob. That literally caused a GENOCIDE. Facebook should be fully held responsible, not just financially, and not in an out of court settlement. Zuckerburg turned a blind eye after being made fully aware what he started. Put him and everyone on down the org chart in jail for it. He can start a new social network for imprisoned CEOs.
I don't know where your experience of print journalism is located - the environment does seem to vary from country to country. In the UK, the great majority of the "traditional print media" is owned by wealthy non-residents pushing (and in some cases overtly subsidising) a rabidly right-wing form of divisive politics - and have been for many decades. Plural, it ain't. From this tiny handful of voices dominating the print media comes the notion that these voices are somehow representative (though they're representative of nothing more than financial self-interest) and "deserve" to be heard more prominently in the media they don't, yet, control.
It seems foolish to assume that the pattern will be different in any other form of media or that politicians, terrified of the proprietors of old and supposedly now irrelevant media giants, are going to storm into battle against the new upstarts, supposedly more powerful still, with vastly more money at their disposal and largely without the constraints of shareholders.
Just to elaborate on your point about the ownership of UK news media, here's a brief breakdown:
Sun, Times - Rupert Murdoch, US and ex-Australian citizen
Daily Mail - "Viscount Rothermere" John Harmsworth, a "non-domiciled" citizen who therefore pays no UK taxes despite his main home being here
Express, Star, Mirror and almost all regional newspapers - Reach PLC, although the Express and Star were until recently owned by potty mouthed porn baron Richard Desmond
Telegraph - the deeply weird Barclay twins, who own a Channel Island that thanks to its feudal system means they avoided all UK tax
Independent, Evening Standard - Alexander Lebedev, Russian-British oligarch with close ties to the KGB/FSB and Putin (Lebedev's father was a KGB officer)
Guardian - owned by a trust that was intended to ensure the publication remains independent (the charter forbids any sale to another organisation)
From the article...
Despite content and safety concerns, Irwin said in an interview late last year she felt empowered by Musk's leadership, claiming he gave her team permission to prioritize user safety over side effects like damaging user numbers.
And then, reality set in.
Or, at least, reality as defined by the Muskrat.
WHy do we only get articles about leadership leaving Twitter ?
Thousnads of engineers and others without TLA also left, where are the analysis or interviews with them ?
This is discrimination all over again, in the old days the upper cases had other titles like Duke or Lord, today they call them CEO...
I guess allt he downvoters dont believe in one vote per person democracy and how the inbalance of reporting to focus only one small group of people is undemocratic. The media is by following this practice, actively supporting the total disproporionate power and salary that these people dont deserve to get.
"Is that balanced ?"
It is: Kings are more important than peons. A corporation is *not* a democracy, it's a Kingdom, literally.
It's reported as such, too.
".. never had an article about them as individuals"
To a corporation firing them they aren't. And really, from news point of view, they aren't either. "This guy got fired from corporation x" is absolutely not interesting non-news.
@KP
Why is recognition only given to people who talk bullshit without actually doing the hard work of engineering ?
Lets face it, leadership types dont have the skills to build anything, they just talk hot air and take credit from the real people who did the real work.
Whats wrong with articles that focus on engineering instead of fast talkers ?
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