Twitter on Monday night disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a department that some critics claimed engaged in disproportionate content moderation of certain political ideologies and individuals.
The company announced in an email that it was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.”
When it was first launched in 2016, the council was composed of mostly left wing industry experts and organizations largely focused on restricting so-called hate speech. Original members included the Anti-Defamation League, Center for Democracy and Technology, Dangerous Speech Project, Feminist Frequency, Love 146, NetSafe, Samaritans, the Wahid Institute, and others.
Yoel Roth, the former global head of Trust and Safety who resigned after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, was responsible for leading the team that suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell exposed by the New York Post.
Roth was also involved in a secret shadow-banning group, reported by journalist Bari Weiss, called “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” that assigned certain censorship levels to numerous conservative accounts.
“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” a company email obtained by the Associated Press read.
An old information page on Twitter’s website, since deleted, noted that the council dealt with child sexual exploitation, suicide prevention, online safety, and tackling other problematic phenomena on the internet, CNN reported.
Ella Irwin, who stepped up to fill the role of head of Trust and Safety in November, said recently that the platform was developing a new strategy for tackling safety and security.
“For now, I think we are biasing towards moving quickly and figuring out the details in some of these areas after,” she said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
On Thursday, three council members announced they were stepping down and criticized Musk for allegedly neglecting combatting dangerous content, including that which could fuel child exploitation.
Musk retorted on Twitter: “It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!”