"The comparison obscures the extremely active roles that the platforms themselves have in shaping and generating conversation," Becca Lewis, who researches networks of far right influencers on social media for the nonprofit Data & Society, said. Public spaces "don’t have algorithms that surface certain content; they don’t have an advertising-based business model meant to drive engagement; they don’t generate billions of dollars of revenue. What we’re actually experiencing is a media and communication environment that we don’t have any apt comparisons for, since we have never experienced anything like this in the past."Twitter's commitment to being a public space, and how it tries to juggle that simultaneously with being a healthy venue for conversation free of harassment or other violations, manifested in it studying how white supremacists use the platform, and whether leaving their accounts online may help de-radicalization efforts. In May, Motherboard reported that Twitter was researching the topic, while other platforms have already banned accounts related to the ideology. Facebook banned white nationalism and separatism in March, calling them ideologically the same as white supremacy.Do you work at Twitter or another social network? Did you used to? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
Twitter has content moderation centers spread across the globe, with facilities in Toronto, Tokyo, San Francisco, Manila, Budapest, Warsaw, Dublin, and Bangalore, Twitter said. In all, its enforcement team is made up of about 1,500 people, the company added. Facebook's own somewhat equivalent group is 15,000 strong (Twitter's monthly active users are a fraction of Facebook's, at 320 million compared to over 2 billion.)"We need to permit as many people in the world as possible for engaging on a public platform, and it means that we need to be open to as many viewpoints as possible."
It's worth mentioning that, on other social networks that have banned specific types of offensive content or specific communities, researchers have found that those communities do not reconstitute themselves in meaningful numbers elsewhere on the site. For example, after Reddit banned a series of racist and misogynistic subreddits, Georgia Tech researchers found that users affected by the ban reduced their overall hate speech and found that many users simply left the platform altogether.Twitter's approach of leaving content up, albeit perhaps not immediately visible to a user, instead of removing it is still open to plenty of criticism."Twitter’s responses, even those that move beyond a binary approach, show how they are actually playing an active role in the type of content that appears and surfaces on their platform," Lewis from Data & Society said. "And hiding content instead of removing it can lead to unintended consequences. Among other issues, it can generate a conspiratorial mindset among content creators who feel that their content is being suppressed but cannot always prove it. In short, it shows a lack of transparency that breeds distrust on the platform while still failing to grapple with the root issues at work."In its early days, the trust and safety team was made up of just around five or six people, one former employee said. Those people were not only responsible for designing and implementing the site's policies, but enforcing them as well with a basic email system, they added."The growth team tended to have priority over everything, because those monthly active users were so crucial."