Elon Musk fires Twitter board and limited content moderation team

Elon Musk has fired Twitter’s board of directors. This makes the billionaire single-handedly responsible for the social network. Also, most employees engaged in content moderation would no longer be able to do their jobs.

Musk has fired nine Twitter executives who made up its board of directors. This includes CEO Parag Agrawal, but also Bret Taylor, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou are fired, according to a report. documents held by the US stock market watchdog have been submitted. In practice, this means that Elon Musk can now individually make all decisions within the social network. This often happens during private takeovers of companies. Musk says in a tweet that the decision is ‘only temporary’, but does not elaborate on this as he usually does.

Musk has already implemented major changes in the content moderation team in that hegemony, company sources tell Bloomberg. Most employees in the Trust and Safety department no longer have access to internal tools to delete messages and block accounts on their own. Twitter uses a combination of automation and cheap foreign powers to assess spam for that process, but internally, some employees have the ability to make decisions manually.

That decision would be part of the transition to Twitter’s new ownership. Musk would like to prevent employees from making changes to Twitter’s codebase. Nevertheless, the cutting of the Trust and Safety department comes at an unfortunate time. Brazil’s presidential elections took place last week and the US midterm elections will be held in the coming days. Twitter employees and pundits fear that trolls and fake news outlets could take advantage of Twitter’s reduced moderation ability during that period. During the Brazilian elections, the options would have been limited, the employees say. The head of the department himself says that the rules are ‘still widely applied’.