by ZeroHedge News Staff at ZeroHedge
Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may recall the episode where extra-dimensional dickhead “Q” is stripped of his powers for spreading chaos throughout the universe.
Well, Elon Musk just did that to Twitter’s content moderation thought police with just weeks to go before midterms – cutting the number of employees who can access censorship tools from hundreds to around 15 people last week, and reducing their ability to influence discussion on the platform.
According to Bloomberg, Musk and his ‘war cabinet‘ have frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and the enforcement of other policies, neutering staff’s abilities to ‘alter or penalize accounts that break rules around misleading information, offensive posts and hate speech.’
They also won’t be able to banish highly credentialed doctors and researchers posting divergent Covid-19 narratives.
All but the most ‘high-impact violations set for manual review’ will remain on the platform, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitter staff use dashboards, known as agent tools, to carry out actions like banning or suspending an account that is deemed to have breached policy. Detection of policy breaches can either be flagged by other Twitter users or detected automatically, but taking action on them requires human input and access to the dashboard tools. Those tools have been suspended since last week, the people said.
This restriction is part of a broader plan to freeze Twitter’s software code to keep employees from pushing changes to the app during the transition to new ownership. Typically this level of access is given to a group of people numbering in the hundreds, and that was initially reduced to about 15 people last week, according to two of the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal decisions. Musk completed his $44 billion deal to take the company private on Oct. 27. -Bloomberg
On Sunday,Twitter employees had limited access to the internal tools to police Brazil’s presidential election.
Meanwhile, the company is still using automated enforcement technology as well as third-party contractors.
The restricted ability to restrict free speech has given Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team the vapors…
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