Elon Musk has dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety council, effectively ending the company’s attempts to prevent harassment even as he has enthusiastically participated in actions on Twitter that have dramatically increased harassment.
Most notably, over the weekend Musk baselessly implied that Yoel Roth, the former head of the Trust and Safety council, is a pedophile. This resulted in Roth experiencing massive harassment and credible death threats that forced him to flee his home.
Members of the council were informed of the move Monday in an email that, like almost all recent company emails, was quickly leaked to the media. Twitter, the email said, is “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.”
There is evidence that Musk’s actions were preemptive: According to The Washington Post, Musk dissolved the council less than an hour before a scheduled zoom meeting with Twitter executives to discuss “recent developments.”
Among those developments, last week three members of the Trust and Safety commission resigned in protest. “Contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and well being of Twitter’s users are on the decline,” the members said in a joint statement.
And of course, there is also Musk’s increasing and unambiguous embrace of right wing politics that includes, among other things, defending Donald Trump’s role in the deadly Jan. 6 attacks and the purposeful spreading of multiple right wing conspiracy theories — part of which involved Musk’s false implication of pedophilia against Roth.
In fact, extremism experts now say that Musk’s actions as Twitter owner are empowering right wing extremists.