San Francisco: The Trust and Safety Council, a group of about 100 independent civil rights, human rights, and other groups established in 2016 to address issues including hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm, and other issues on the site, has been disbanded by Twitter, run by Elon Musk.
The council and Twitter representatives were scheduled to meet Monday night. However, several group members claim that soon before the scheduled meeting, Twitter notified the group via email that it was dissolving the group, Associated Press reported.
The council members spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retaliation and supplied screenshots of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press. The email said Twitter was "reevaluating how best to bring external insights" and the council is "not the best structure to do this."
"Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal," said the email, which was signed "Twitter."
"Twitter's Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues," tweeted council member Alex Holmes. "At no point was it a governing body or decision making."
The volunteer committee offered knowledge and recommendations on how Twitter should more effectively tackle hatred, abuse, and other ills, but it lacked any formal ability to make decisions and didn't look into individual content disputes. Musk first stated he would create a new "content moderation council" to assist in making big choices shortly after purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in late October, but he then changed his mind.
San Francisco-based Twitter, which confirmed the meeting with the council on Thursday, promised an "open conversation and Q&A" with staff members, including the newly appointed director of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.
That occurred on the same day that three council members announced their resignation in a tweet that read in said that "contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter's users are on the decline."
Following Musk's escalating criticism of them and Twitter's previous leadership for supposedly not doing enough to eliminate child sexual exploitation on the network, those former council members quickly became the subject of online assaults.
"It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" Musk tweeted.
Some of the council's remaining members were concerned about the increasing number of attacks on it and demanded that Twitter stop misrepresenting the council's function in an email written to the business earlier on Monday.
The email said that the false allegations made by Twitter leaders were "endangering current and former Council members."
In fact, one of the advisory groups for the Trust and Safety Council was dedicated to preventing child exploitation. This included YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need, the Rati Foundation, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.