After Musk announced that most banned Twitter accounts would be reinstated, a report says that around 62,000 accounts with more than 10K followers each have so far been restored.

Other Twitter news includes a claim that the layoffs and resignations have left the company with just one person responsible for removing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) …

Background

At the end of October, Musk promised that none of the suspended or banned Twitter accounts would be reinstated until a new content moderation council had been convened to consider the matter.

Less than a month later, Musk decided instead to let his Twitter followers decide (bots and all), with an initial poll on whether Donald Trump’s account should be restored. Shortly afterward, he announced that he would act on the poll.

He subsequently held another poll on whether most suspended and banned accounts should be reinstated, and again decided to act on the Yes vote.

Banned Twitter accounts restored

Platformer reports that around 62,000 banned or suspended accounts with 10k+ followers have so far been reinstated.

COVID-19 misinformation now welcome

CNN reports that alongside the account restorations, Twitter has abandoned its ban on harmful COVID-19 misinformation.

Twitter has begun the process of reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, Platformer has learned, including one account that has over 5 million followers, and 75 accounts with over 1 million followers. (The identities of the accounts could not be learned before press time.) Internally, employees have referred to this event as “the Big Bang.”

Musk berates advertisers, with predictable results

It’s been reported that nearly all the big brand advertisers have either paused or massively reduced their ad spend on Twitter, and reinstating toxic accounts can only make things worse.

Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy […]

Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change. Instead, some Twitter users Monday night spotted a note added to the page on Twitter’s website that outlines its Covid policy.

“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note read.

Musk yesterday publicly berated Apple – rumored to be the biggest advertiser on Twitter – for ceasing most of its advertising on the platform. The Financial Times reports that he has been calling the CEOs of other companies to lodge similar complaints, with predictable results.

The report goes on to say that the few brands that do want to continue ad campaigns have faced difficulties doing so – after their Twitter ad sales contacts were fired, analytics have been unavailable, and ad-booking systems have fallen over following the loss of most engineers.

Musk, meanwhile, has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire entrepreneur.

CSAM removal team decimated

Another Musk promise was that removing CSAM was the company’s “priority #1.” This is no longer possible given layoffs in the company’s moderation teams, say reports, with Wired reporting that the cuts to CSAM monitors have been drastic.

It’s not completely clear from the report whether the remaining individual is responsible for stopping CSAM globally or in the Asia Pacific region, but even if it is the latter, that region is home to 60% of the world’s population.

Just one staff member remains on a key team dedicated to removing child sexual abuse content from the site, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who both requested to remain anonymous […]

Based in Twitter’s Asian headquarters in Singapore, the team enforces the company’s ban on child sex abuse material (CSAM) in the Asia Pacific region. Right now, that team has just one full-time employee. 

Twitter does use some automated systems like the fingerprint-matching tech Apple was due to introduce, but experts say that human moderation is a vital component.

When Twitter banned Trump from the platform for inciting violence, he responded with a lawsuit. Trump lost the case, but filed an appeal. Bloomberg reports that even though Musk has now reactivated Trump’s Twitter account, that appeal will proceed.

The tools used by platforms to scan for child abuse struggle to differentiate between a consenting adult and an unconsenting child, according to Arda Gerkens, who runs the Dutch foundation EOKM, which reports CSAM online. “The technology is not good enough yet,” she says, adding that’s why human staff are so important.  

Twitter’s misinformation experts in demand

While Musk may be welcoming back sources of disinformation, and firing the people who attempted to stop it, other companies are taking the opposite approach. The New York Times reports that former Twitter trust and safety execs are in demand.

Trump has no plan to withdraw his appeal of a May ruling that dismissed his challenge to the company’s decision to ban him from the platform after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said John Coale, his attorney.

Despite public comments by Twitter’s new billionaire owner that he will allow Trump’s Twitter account to be restored, “you don’t just do things on your own, you should talk to the other side or wait,” Coale said. “There’s more to it than just letting him back in so we want to talk to see if we can figure something out,” he said.

Photo: Paolo Nicolello/Unsplash

Overtures arrived from rival tech services, retailers, consulting firms, government contractors and other organizations that want to use the former Twitter employees […] to track and combat false and toxic information on the internet.