New waves are washing over Twitter as it moves to disband the Trust and Safety Council. This group of experts was formed in 2016 to ensure that the platform maintained some form of human rights. After some council members resigned recently, it seems that Elon Musk feels they can do without the expert advice trusted for so long.
Before the council members headed to a meeting yesterday, Twitter HQ sent them an email detailing the future of their contribution. While their ideas and active involvement in the past were appreciated, there’s no guarantee that their thoughts will be considered going forward. As a matter of fact, Elon might rely heavily on AI and algorithms to do the moderation instead.
Now, let’s just think about this for a moment. On the one hand, I can understand where Elon is going with all these movements. After seeing how much money was being spent on Twitter with not enough returns, he clearly wants to improve the financial situation. After all, he spent billions of dollars on the platform. So by automating moderation, he won’t need to pay humans to do the work anymore.
Also, humans are more likely to make errors or be biased.
On the other hand, how much does automation actually work? Let’s take Instagram, for example, which has automation in place to make sure certain content isn’t posted. However, there are many times we’ve seen that it doesn’t work properly. Some profiles get slammed for nudity by simply showing a tattoo on a shoulder, while others can post full back or front nudity and get away with it (unless reported).
We’ll just have to wait and see what the future of the Trust and Safety Council holds. Also, it’s going to be fun and games seeing automated moderation causing chaos on Twitter and giving me more fodder to write about on Softonic.
