Elon Musk hires moderators to monitor
Social media company
Musk’s social networking site will create a new ‘Trust and Safety center of Excellence’ in Austin, Texas, where the new moderation team will work.
X was recently exposed by an Australian online safety commissioner, eSafety, for laying off 80 percent of its security engineers since Musk took over the company in 2022.
The decision to hire 100 staff for the new safety team comes ahead of a Senate hearing on children’s online protection that will take place on January 31, 2024.
Elon Musk hires moderators to monitor
Social media company
The eSafety Commission has obtained a detailed look at the software engineers who used Australia’s groundbreaking Online Safety Act and found that 1,213 specialist ‘trust and safety employees’, including contractors, had left X since Musk’s takeover.
Australian eSafety Commissioner Julia Inman Grant, who previously worked at Twitter, said it was the first time these shocking figures had been revealed.
“Removing eighty percent of these specialist engineers would be like Volvo – known for its safety standards – wiping out all its designers and engineers,” Inman Grant told AFP.
“You have a perfect storm. You are drastically reducing your defenses and you are introducing repeat offenders back onto the platform,” she said.
Australia has led the global push to regulate social media, forcing tech companies to outline how they tackle issues such as hate speech and child sexual abuse.
In October last year, the eSafety Commission fined X Aus$610,500 (US$388,000) for failing to demonstrate how it would crack down on child pornography.
But X ignored the deadline to pay the fine before taking legal action to have the fine overturned.
However, X has now made the decision to hire more content moderators just ahead of the US Senate hearing expected to grill CEOs of
In a blog post on Friday, X said it suspended 12.4 million accounts last year for violating rules against child sexual exploitation.
This is a dramatic increase from the 2.3 million account suspensions in 2022.
X has made the decision to hire more content moderators just ahead of a US Senate hearing that is expected to grill CEOs of X and other social media platforms on child safety online
Musk’s social networking site will create a new ‘Trust and Safety center of Excellence’ in Austin, Texas, where the new moderation team will work. The current X headquarters (pictured) is in San Francisco
Musk has previously faced criticism for trying to minimize moderation on the social media site
Members of the public were quick to call out X for firing the moderators in the first place in light of new hiring plans.
“I think a lot of the people who were fired for not doing something actually did something,” one Reddit user responded to the news.
“So basically… announce this, mention it at the hearings, then never dismiss it again, but keep mentioning how they plan to use it when questioned by the media,” said another.
Musk has previously faced criticism for trying to minimize moderation on the social media site.
The
X faced controversy last week after explicit AI-generated photos of pop star Taylor Swift were shared on the website.
Dramatically, X blocked all searches for Taylor Swift’s name in the photo fallout.
The Dozens of graphic images were originally uploaded to Celeb Jihad and showed Swift performing a series of sex acts while clothed Kansas City Chief memorabilia and in the stadium.
One image of Swift shared on X was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended, according to a New York Times report. The company was widely criticized for its apparent slow response to the photos’ emergence, eventually suspending the account they originated from