Twitter Official Confirms Some Content Enforcement Work Frozen After Elon Musk Takeover

Elon Musk arrives at an event in New York City, on May 2, 2022. Reuters/Andrew Kelly

A top Twitter official said that some content moderation work on the social media website has been halted following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company last week.

Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity for Twitter, responded to a Bloomberg News story that claimed many Twitter employees were denied access to content moderation tools after Musk’s takeover.

“This is exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk,” Roth wrote on the platform. “We’re still enforcing our rules at scale.”

Roth wrote on Monday that Twitter has removed more than 1,500 accounts and reduced views of posts in connection to allegedly “hateful conduct” on the website. He wrote that impressions don’t tell the entire story and that Twitter is going to “continue investing in policy and technology to make things better.”

A Bloomberg reporter, citing anonymous sources, claimed on Monday evening that “a wide swath” of content moderation staff had their tools locked. “Usually, hundreds of people on the team could remove posts” with alleged misinformation, the reporter wrote, saying “it’s now down to 15 people.”

Twitter’s moderators have been accused of harboring a left-wing bias as numerous Republican and conservative figures have been suspended from the website since early 2021. The company was also accused of election meddling when it blocked the sharing of a bombshell New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business deals with just weeks to go before the 2020 election before it locked the newspaper out of its account for more than two weeks.

Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey later admitted that the company’s handling of the NY Post story and reporting around Hunter Biden was problematic. Dorsey has since left the company and reportedly endorsed Musk’s takeover of the firm earlier this year.

Musk, a so-called free speech absolutist, has often criticized Twitter’s content moderation rules. In a letter on Thursday ahead of the buyout, the Tesla CEO told advertisers that Twitter will not be allowed to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”

Musk dissolved Twitter’s board of directors and made himself the San Francisco-based firm’s sole director, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission posted on Monday. It also officially confirmed that former CEO Parag Agrawal is not the firm’s chief executive any longer.

“In accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement, effective as of the effective time of the Merger, the following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the Merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou,” it wrote.

Musk also reportedly fired former content moderation chief Vijaya Gadde, who is believed to have been the Twitter executive responsible for the suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account last year, and Ned Segal, Twitter’s former chief financial officer.