SAN FRANCISCO: Ella Irwin, Twitter’s second head of trust and safety has stepped down less than a year after Elon Musk acquired the social media company.
According to the BBC, Ella Irwin assumed the slot when Yoel Roth resigned in November 2022, one month after Elon Musk acquired control of the business.
Content moderation, a subject that has received more attention since Musk’s takeover, is the responsibility of the head of trust and safety.
Irwin told Reuters and the Wall Street Journal about her official resignation saying she has resigned. It could not be confirmed why she resigned.
But that comes a day after Musk questioned a Twitter content moderation choice in public.
He referred to it as “a mistake by many people at Twitter” that the exposure of a video had been restricted due to claims of gender appropriation.
Whether you support using someone’s chosen pronouns or not, failing to do so is at the very least impolite and unquestionably legal, he said.
It occurs a week after the social media platform withdrew from the voluntary code of conduct established by the European Union to combat misinformation.
Linda Yaccarino, the former president of advertising at NBCUniversal, was named the new CEO of Twitter by Musk last month. She hasn’t yet begun performing her job.
Content moderation
In-depth investigations have shown that hate speech has grown under Musk’s leadership. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, a campaign organisation located in London, found that insults significantly rose following the takeover.
And Twitter terminated the volunteer organisation that provided it with advice on self-harm, child abuse, and hate speech in December 2022.
With Musk declaring the platform’s Community Notes function will be extended to photographs, there have been efforts to control the veracity of information.
A crowdsourced fact-checking system called Community Notes allows Twitter users to post comments that give context to tweets and frequently mark them as inaccurate or misleading.
The platform intends to eventually add video to this function.
