Romain Rouillard 8:22 p.m., March 06, 2023

According to a survey published by the BBC, Twitter employees say they can no longer ensure the moderation of the social network since the arrival of Elon Musk at its head.

Consequently, conspiracy theories, fake news or other hateful content would tend to proliferate on the platform.

For several weeks, Twitter has been much more permissive with propagators of hateful content and false information.

In any case, this is the conclusion drawn by Marianna Spring, journalist for the BBC.

As BFMTV reports, the British media published a major survey on Monday on the difficulties encountered by platform employees in moderating publications.

As a result, unscrupulous users would have virtually carte blanche to post anything they could think of, including harmful messages. 

An impression confirmed by the University of Sheffield which peeled the hateful remarks made on Twitter against Marianna Spring in person.

And the conclusion is without appeal.

The abuse suffered by the journalist has more than tripled since billionaire Elon Musk took control of the social network last October.  

A wave of layoffs

The action taken by the owner of Tesla within Twitter could indeed partly explain this proliferation of problematic content on the network.

The SpaceX founder has never made a secret of his desire to "restore" free speech on Twitter.

"The rock on which we build a democracy", according to him.

A leitmotiv which also prompted him to reactivate the account of former US President Donald Trump who had been banned from the network after the assault on the Capitol in Washington in January 2021.

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To do this, the whimsical billionaire carried out a spectacular wave of dismissals in the offices of Twitter.

Last January, BFMTV indicated that the major cleaning had in particular targeted the staff in charge of misinformation and online harassment.

A drastic reduction in the workforce, also noted by the BBC, which met several employees of the platform in San Francisco, California. 

On condition of anonymity, an engineer uses a metaphor to describe a form of chaos.

"Twitter is like a building where all the rooms are on fire. When you look at it from the outside, the facade looks immaculate. But in reality, nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, the taps , everything,” he says.

And to deplore a deterioration in working conditions.

"A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what more than 20 people were doing before. That leaves a lot more risk, a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong," he said. 

A feature to limit hateful content, removed

The BBC was also able to speak with Lisa Jennings Young, one of the employees fired by Elon Musk.

The developer specialized in introducing features designed to protect Internet users from online hate.

A position now vacant according to her.

"There's no one working on that right now."

Worse, the functionality to report to a user the presence of hateful terms in the tweet he is about to publish, has been purely and simply deleted according to her.

This option had been launched by its teams just before the massive layoff plan.

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The few dikes making it possible to limit these undesirable messages therefore seem to give way one after the other.

In its survey, the BBC reveals that the creation of misogynistic or abusive accounts jumped by 69%.

Contacted by the British media, Twitter did not respond.