Twitter is less secure under Elon Musk’s management style, says former top official

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s dictatorial management style risks leading the company to business mistakes, content moderation disasters and degradation of key platform features that help keep vulnerable users safe, according to with a former top Twitter official who led the company’s content moderation before abruptly resigning this month.

The social media company’s unsuccessful launch of a paid verification feature “is an example of a disaster that got away” amid the chaos Musk brought to Twitter, and the prospect of further disasters made it impossible to stay, said Yoel Roth, a former company’s integrity chief, during an interview with American journalist Kara Swisher this Tuesday (29), in his first public appearance since leaving Twitter on November 10.

Roth and other colleagues tried to warn Musk about the “obvious” problems with his plan to offer a verified checkmark to any user who pays $8 a month. But Musk went ahead of his own accord anyway, leading to a wave of new imposter accounts posing as big brands, athletes and other verified users that soon forced Twitter to suspend the feature.

“It went off the rails exactly the way we anticipated,” Roth said.

The public musings of a senior Twitter leader who came into close contact with Musk in the company’s early days of ownership — a period marked by internal turmoil and a damaging advertiser revolt — provide the latest evidence of a billionaire CEO leading from his gut. at the expense of virtually everyone else.

There was no explosive confrontation with Musk that led to Roth’s resignation, and the episode involving Twitter’s paid verification feature was just one of many factors that led to Roth’s decision to leave, he said.

But the experience exemplified the kind of damage Musk’s liberal approach can do, Roth added, likening his final weeks at the company to standing in front of a leaking dam, desperately trying to plug the holes but knowing that eventually something would get through.

In the hour-long interview, Roth warned that the approach laissez-faire from Musk to content moderation and its lack of a transparent process for making and enforcing the platform’s policies have made Twitter less secure, in part because not enough employees understand that bad actors are constantly trying to manipulate the system in ways that automated algorithms don’t know how to capture.

“People are not standing still,” he said. “They are actively inventing new ways to be horrible on the internet.”

He urged Twitter users to monitor the operation of key security features such as muting, blocking and protecting tweets as warning signs that the platform could be breaking.

“If protected tweets stop working, run,” he said.

For two weeks after Musk closed on Twitter, Roth presented himself as a voice of stability and calm at the heart of a company undergoing dramatic change. Roth knew that by staying with the company, Musk was using him to help keep advertisers from abandoning the platform.

But Roth also suggested that he and others who didn’t leave Twitter may have influenced Musk and prevented him from making harmful unilateral decisions, which he had “multiple opportunities” to do.

Even as he spent his first days in the new regime battling an “increase in hateful conduct on Twitter” seemingly intended to test Musk’s tolerance for racism and anti-Semitism on the platform, Roth sought to reassure the public that the trust and safety work of the Twitter continued unhindered.

He shared data on the platform’s ongoing enforcement efforts and downplayed the impact of Twitter’s mass layoffs on its content moderation team, saying the job cuts were less severe in that department compared to the broader organization.

On November 9, Roth spoke alongside Musk during a public event on Twitter Spaces aimed at persuading advertisers not to shy away from the platform. In the hour-long session, which was attended by more than 100,000 listeners, including representatives from Adidas, Chevron and other major brands, Roth was optimistic about Twitter’s plans to tackle hate speech.

The next day, Roth abruptly resigned, joining a host of other senior executives, including Twitter’s chief privacy officer and chief information security officer.

In a subsequent New York Times article, Roth said the reason for his departure boiled down to Musk’s highly personal and offhand approach to content moderation. Roth’s essay accused Musk of perpetuating a “lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements on Twitter’s rules.”

On Tuesday, Roth said the popular narrative that depicts Musk as a villain is wrong and doesn’t reflect his own experiences with him. But, he said, Musk surrounds himself with people who rarely challenge him.

Before Musk took over Twitter, Roth wrote several commitments to himself that would trigger the decision to quit. One threshold, he said — one that was never reached — was that Roth would refuse to lie for Musk. Another limit, which ended up being reached and boosted his decision to resign, was “if Twitter started to be governed by dictatorial decree and not by a policy”.

Roth’s role at Twitter came under intense scrutiny in 2020 after the company attached a fact-check message to fake tweets by then-U.S. President Donald Trump.

Tweets Roth sent in 2016 and 2017 that were critical of President Trump and his supporters were dug up and used to argue that Roth and Twitter were biased against the president.

Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “Just saying, we fly over those states that voted a racist tangerine for a reason.”

Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it is unfortunate to see individual employees being targeted by company decisions.”

When Roth was still working at Twitter in October, Musk was asked about Roth’s old tweets.

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to make it clear that I support Yoel. My feeling is that he has high integrity and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” tweeted Musk.

Roth also became Twitter’s personal face and target of harassment after the company decided to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden, a decision then-CEO Jack Dorsey said was a mistake.

“It is widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. This is not true. It’s absolutely, unequivocally false,” Roth told Swisher on Tuesday.

Roth didn’t think it was appropriate to remove the content from Twitter, he said, but at the time the story seemed to have the hallmarks of a hacking operation. hack-and-leak of information.

Roth also said on Tuesday that, in hindsight, suppressing the Hunter Biden story was a mistake. But he defended other Twitter decisions to ban Trump for his activities surrounding the January 6 Capitol riot, as well as a personal account belonging to Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and an account belonging to the satirical website Babylon Bee.

All three cases involved obvious violations of Twitter’s publicly accessible written policies, Roth said, making them a much clearer case for enforcement.

Amid the layoffs that have decimated Twitter’s content moderation team, Musk has said he intends to rely much more on collectively checking tweets to provide context for misleading claims. But Roth said that by doing so, Twitter risks abdicating its accountability to the public, which it still must enforce despite being a private company.

Policymakers should require platforms to share data with academics and researchers, he said, preventing private platforms like Twitter from shirking a duty of transparency.

Asked to give Musk a single piece of advice going forward, Roth paused for a brief moment.

“Humility goes a long way,” he said.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*Donie O’Sullivan of CNN contributed to this story