Twitter's former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth on Tuesday said the social media company was not safer under new owner Elon Musk, warning in his first interview since resigning this month that the company no longer had enough staff for safety work.
Mr Roth had tweeted after Mr Musk's takeover that by some measures, Twitter safety had improved under the billionaire's ownership.
Asked in an interview at the Knight Foundation conference on Tuesday whether he still felt that way, Mr Roth said: “No.”
Mr Roth was a Twitter veteran who helped steer the social media platform through several watershed decisions, including the move to permanently suspend its most famous user, former US President Donald Trump, last year.
His departure further rattled advertisers, many of whom backed away from Twitter after Mr Musk laid off half of the staff, including many involved with content moderation.
Before Mr Musk assumed the helm at Twitter, about 2,200 people globally were focused on content moderation work, said Mr Roth. He said he did not know the number after the acquisition because the corporate directory had been turned off.
Twitter under Mr Musk began to stray from its adherence to written and publicly available policies towards content decisions made unilaterally by Mr Musk, which Mr Roth cited as a reason for his resignation.
“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,” he said.
The revamp of the Twitter Blue premium subscription, which would allow users to pay for a verified checkmark on their account, launched despite warnings and advice from the trust and safety team, Mr Roth said.
The launch was quickly beset by spammers impersonating major public companies such as Eli Lilly, Nestle and Lockheed Martin.
Mr Roth also said on Tuesday that Twitter erred in restricting the dissemination of a New York Post article that made claims about then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son shortly before the 2020 presidential election.
But he defended Twitter's decision to permanently suspend Mr Trump for risk of further incitement of violence after the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“We saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off,” Mr Roth said. “We saw people dead in the Capitol.”
Mr Musk tweeted on November19 that Mr Trump's account would be reinstated after a slim majority voted in favour of the move in a surprise Twitter poll.
Meanwhile, Twitter has rolled back a policy that was aimed at tackling misinformation related to Covid-19 on the social media platform, lending itself to the risk of a potential surge in false claims even as cases rise in China and some parts of the world.
“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy,” according to an update on its blog page.
The specific measures that Twitter will drop were not immediately clear, and the company did not immediately respond to a request to share more information.
At the onset of Covid in 2020, Twitter instated a number of measures including labels and warning messages on tweets with disputed information about the health crisis and a framework to have users remove tweets that advanced harmfully false claims related to vaccines.
Meta Platforms-owned Facebook and Alphabet's YouTube services employed similar measures, which are currently in place.
Our legal consultants
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
Quick pearls of wisdom
Focus on gratitude: And do so deeply, he says. “Think of one to three things a day that you’re grateful for. It needs to be specific, too, don’t just say ‘air.’ Really think about it. If you’re grateful for, say, what your parents have done for you, that will motivate you to do more for the world.”
Know how to fight: Shetty married his wife, Radhi, three years ago (he met her in a meditation class before he went off and became a monk). He says they’ve had to learn to respect each other’s “fighting styles” – he’s a talk it-out-immediately person, while she needs space to think. “When you’re having an argument, remember, it’s not you against each other. It’s both of you against the problem. When you win, they lose. If you’re on a team you have to win together.”
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Seemar’s top six for the Dubai World Cup Carnival:
1. Reynaldothewizard
2. North America
3. Raven’s Corner
4. Hawkesbury
5. New Maharajah
6. Secret Ambition
MATCH INFO
Manchester United v Everton
Where: Old Trafford, Manchester
When: Sunday, kick-off 7pm (UAE)
How to watch: Live on BeIN Sports 11HD
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
GROUPS
Group Gustavo Kuerten
Novak Djokovic (x1)
Alexander Zverev (x3)
Marin Cilic (x5)
John Isner (x8)
Group Lleyton Hewitt
Roger Federer (x2)
Kevin Anderson (x4)
Dominic Thiem (x6)
Kei Nishikori (x7)
Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
Books, letters and archives
Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
The biog
Name: Younis Al Balooshi
Nationality: Emirati
Education: Doctorate degree in forensic medicine at the University of Bonn
Hobbies: Drawing and reading books about graphic design
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