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> but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore. Twitter has publicly laid off about 75% of its staff fairly evenly across the entire compa

> but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore. Twitter has publicly laid off about 75% of its staff fairly evenly across the entire company. We don't have exact counts of employees, but we know how many employees the company used to have, and we know roughly how many were fired. So now look at job postings; has Twitter put out calls to hire thousands of moderators to replace those people? No. > Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue Sure, whatever, you can debate anything you'd like. But you're going to have a hard time getting people to humor you or take you seriously. If your argument is that actually Twitter hasn't slashed its staff and there are tons of moderators and that all of the reports about it are false, then you're not arguing a coherent enough position to take seriously. > The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams. When you are doing human moderation specifically, raw numbers matter. A human being can only physically review a finite number of abuse reports a day, and as they are stretched more and as they are pressured to make faster decisions, their accuracy goes down. This is generally agreed on by pretty much everyone -- which is exactly why Twitter was criticized in the past for its moderation approaches. Twitter's moderation teams (which were heavily reliant on contractors who didn't get the perks you're talking about in the first place) were understaffed before Elon took over. The article we are talking under directly calls this out as a problem. So no, you can't fire most of those people and not replace them and expect the remaining people to be better at moderation, it just doesn't work that way. Human moderation means that at some point in the process, a human being needs to physically look at the content being reported and make an informed decision. That requires raw numbers. > would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers? Twitter's legal team did often show up to court. Why do you think I'm praising them? Yes, I know that many legal teams in corporations don't get involved in actual cases that often, that's why Twitter's legal team deserves some level of praise for being different. > This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team. Twitter's legal team was not perfect, but they were uncharacteristically aggressive about preserving anonymity compared to other social media companies. I'm not talking about just taking objections to the government, Twitter's legal team has literally sued the government on behalf of individual users before. Again, not perfect. But noticeably aggressive about this stuff beyond what many of their competitors were doing. > and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was. [...] I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things I feel like you're conflating Twitter's legal team with every single other team on the platform? Do you think that Twitter's lawyers were specifically responsible for every bad moderation decision that the company made? Twitter's lawyers were not in charge of hiring moderators or deciding what resources they would get. They weren't in charge of deciding Twitter's overall moderation direction, you are thinking of management and heads of safety. Once again, you don't have to like Twitter's legal team. Are you able to recognize that regardless of whether or not you like the legal team Twitter used to have, it is still important for free speech that Twitter have a proactive legal team today that isn't jumping between multiple companies? The problem isn't that Musk people fired people, the problem is that he didn't follow that up by hiring. I don't particularly care if Musk feels good about existing staff. It's just foolish for his followup to firing people not to be to bring in qualified replacements. ---- > That is actually false It is actually not. Twitter's overall moderation teams are smaller than than they used to be, and that has included the dissolving (and near-dissolving) of specific CSAM teams, and severing ties with a ton of contractors. Now, I'm sure that Musk would argue he's just merged teams together or given people shared responsibilities. But I will point out that doubling up responsibilities for CSAM moderation teams is also stretching them thin. You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. Who has been hired to replace the heads of child safety that were fired? What contractors have been brought in to replace the contractors that Twitter severed ties with? You don't think Musk would be bragging about those job postings and hires if they existed? As a piece of history, Twitter tried to launch an OnlyFans competitor in pre-Musk days and the project was scrapped in part because Twitter acknowledged internally at the time that it did not have resources to do CSAM moderating at the scale necessary to support that platform. Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators specifically for handling CSAM, that problem hasn't changed. Shuffling people around wouldn't be enough to fix that problem even if Musk had the people available to shuffle around. Which to be clear, he literally doesn't, Twitter's employee count across the board including its moderation teams is a fraction of what it used to be.

phpisthebest 4y ago
>You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over, and previous twitter exec turned a blind eye to the issue ignoring both internal and external sources while they focused on banning wrong think >>Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators. Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin [1], current head of trust and safety where she specifically before Elon "were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding." Or the Account of @elizableu where she as chronicled the rapid improvements Elon has brought to this subject. it is not a matter of my personal preference, I trust the people on the ground, not the media. [1] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216 https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216
- danShumway 4y ago
  > No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over Which experts and how is this being measured? Because I can't find sources that confirm that claim: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon-musk-twitter-csam-lawsuit/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon... Do you have ANY actual numbers to back that up, at all? Let alone numbers measured by independent experts and not just filtered through Twitter PR? > I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators. I don't know how to get across to you that human moderation requires humans. The act of moderation requires a human being to sit down, look at a piece of content, and decide if it's in violation of a policy. Then that process is repeated over and over again for the duration of the workday. Having bodies in the chairs to look at the content is not optional. Particularly not where CSAM is concerned, which is an area where moderator turnover is astronomical because moderating CSAM is effectively the equivalent of feeding your brain poison every day until you have a breakdown and have to go to therapy. It is a nasty, horrible job and there really isn't a way around the fact that it requires a lot of moderators working in rotations. There's a limit to how often someone can be shown horrifying images in a workweek before they decide that they would rather be doing anything at all other than continuing to show up at work. That part of the moderation job isn't glamorous, and it usually happens behind the scenes with contractors. It's an awful part of the tech industry that doesn't get much attention because it's unpleasant to talk about and unpleasant to acknowledge how much we rely on underpaid contractors ruining their own lives to keep our platforms safe. But the gist is that an engineer doing "hardcore programming" is not a substitute for having thousands and thousands of moderators actually reviewing images. ---- > Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin That Elon's current head of safety is praising him isn't surprising -- one thing we've all learned from the way he's run Twitter is that you don't get to work for Elon at all unless you're pretty proactive about praising him. But there have been zero independent measurements that confirm these claims, and actual experts in the field (read, not just a current employee and a couple fan/activist accounts) are concerned about the direction the platform is headed and about the lack of investment in moderation teams. But since those experts are talking to journalists and not just posting to Twitter, maybe it doesn't matter what they think /s.

phpisthebest 4y ago

>You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over, and previous twitter exec turned a blind eye to the issue ignoring both internal and external sources while they focused on banning wrong think >>Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators. Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin [1], current head of trust and safety where she specifically before Elon "were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding." Or the Account of @elizableu where she as chronicled the rapid improvements Elon has brought to this subject. it is not a matter of my personal preference, I trust the people on the ground, not the media. [1] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216 https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216

danShumway 4y ago
> No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over Which experts and how is this being measured? Because I can't find sources that confirm that claim: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon-musk-twitter-csam-lawsuit/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon... Do you have ANY actual numbers to back that up, at all? Let alone numbers measured by independent experts and not just filtered through Twitter PR? > I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators. I don't know how to get across to you that human moderation requires humans. The act of moderation requires a human being to sit down, look at a piece of content, and decide if it's in violation of a policy. Then that process is repeated over and over again for the duration of the workday. Having bodies in the chairs to look at the content is not optional. Particularly not where CSAM is concerned, which is an area where moderator turnover is astronomical because moderating CSAM is effectively the equivalent of feeding your brain poison every day until you have a breakdown and have to go to therapy. It is a nasty, horrible job and there really isn't a way around the fact that it requires a lot of moderators working in rotations. There's a limit to how often someone can be shown horrifying images in a workweek before they decide that they would rather be doing anything at all other than continuing to show up at work. That part of the moderation job isn't glamorous, and it usually happens behind the scenes with contractors. It's an awful part of the tech industry that doesn't get much attention because it's unpleasant to talk about and unpleasant to acknowledge how much we rely on underpaid contractors ruining their own lives to keep our platforms safe. But the gist is that an engineer doing "hardcore programming" is not a substitute for having thousands and thousands of moderators actually reviewing images. ---- > Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin That Elon's current head of safety is praising him isn't surprising -- one thing we've all learned from the way he's run Twitter is that you don't get to work for Elon at all unless you're pretty proactive about praising him. But there have been zero independent measurements that confirm these claims, and actual experts in the field (read, not just a current employee and a couple fan/activist accounts) are concerned about the direction the platform is headed and about the lack of investment in moderation teams. But since those experts are talking to journalists and not just posting to Twitter, maybe it doesn't matter what they think /s.