To a team of about six or seven and be able to keep on top of the problem. And how he welcomed back banned accounts. Bang out the machete, boom in her face, and then grip her up by the neck, shut up, bitch leaving users feeling unprotected. I would ask, why are these accounts that are bullying i and harassing people still allowed on the platform . Im the bbc� s disinformation and social media correspondent. Some of twitter� s 350 million users have been getting in touch with me about a rise in hate and abuse. Im dr viki male, and im a Senior Lecturer in reproductive immunology. There used to be a mechanism for reporting misinformation. My name is helen, and im a survivor of domestic abuse. I have experienced and seen first hand how significantly worse the online abuse has been on twitter. My name is ellie wilson and im a Rape Survivor whos been using social media to try and campaign to end violence against women. In the early hours of. New years day 2018, i was raped while unconscious by someone i trusted. This was the beginning of a cycle of abuse that lasted years. Ellie tweeted in january this year after the man who raped her was sentenced to five years in jail. She received a barrage of abuse. I find it most difficult, the people that say that i wasnt raped or that this didnt happen and that im lying. But also, its sort of like a secondary trauma. Have the messages been overtly misogynistic . Yes. There are some messages that, you know. Are directly about me, but there are also messages about women in general. You know, women lie, i women are manipulative, women bring thisi upon themselves. There are dozens of accounts using twitter to abuse ellie and other Rape Survivors. This one, for example, which appears to have several accounts in the same name, doing the same thing. Yeah, that account i know has targeted my friends as well. Misogynistic, blaming them for being raped. That sort of thing. I noticed a lot of the accounts have become far more active in the last few months. So, whats changed . Im off to San Francisco, to where twitter was founded, to find out. Im going to meet the insiders who signed up to twitter� s Founding Mission to give everyone the power to share ideas and information. Lovely to meet you. Its so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us. The mission, right, to serve the public conversation, we all really took that very seriously. And not only the public conversation, but really working hard to elevate voices that had previously struggled to affect that conversation. Lisa Jennings Young joined the company in 2019 as it was rapidly expanding. But with twitter� s growth had also come problems. We had noticed over the past few years that individuals were tweeting less and less. And thats because, you know, of fear of abuse and harassment. Lisas team worked on features designed to protect users from online hate. We didnt always get it right, you know, and we very publicly didnt get it right sometimes. It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better, you know, all the time. Twitter had developed a set of rules designed to safeguard users. Helen sage lee joined the platform in 2021. A lot of the policies that are written for social Media Companies and for Different Social Media platforms are put into words that very distinctly outline harm. Employees who are reallyjust enforcing policy, or trying to better understand how to enforce policy in a way that is fair to everybody else, it can be challenging. Two years ago, twitter suspended one of its best known and most active users us president donald trump. And get that suspension removed. And then there are some suspensions that are permanent, and those are the ones that cause more harm to the general public. After Trump Supporters stormed the capitol, he was permanently banned. Twitter said he was inciting violence. But his removal triggered a debate about freedom of speech. It struck a chord with another high profile tweeter elon musk. Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy, he tweeted. Do you believe twitter rigorously adheres to this principle . A month later, in april 2022, musk launched a takeover bid. Six, five, four, three, two, one. Elon musk is the second richest man in the world. His Spacex Rockets and tesla Electric Cars have made him a globalfigure. Sources tell the Associated Press elon musk has taken over twitter. The Twitter Takeover appears to be complete, with elon musk at the helm. Musk is expected to address twitter employees. Musk bought the platform outright for 41; billion. The bird is freed, he tweeted. A new twitter era had begun. Im looking for something that as broadly inclusive as possible, thats as trusted as possible as a system, and i hope were successful in that regard. Im off to meet a member of twitter� s trust and safety council. Created in 2016, the volunteer groups job was to advise the company on user safety. We werent sure if this brilliant man who launched satellites and made cars would be able to handle this very, very different animal called a social media platform. Its a long Learning Process to figure out how to keep users safe, to keep conversations civil, to make platforms work for everybody. Its really, really complicated. Did you get to meet elon musk or hearfrom him on a call at all . We. There was radio silence. We never heard from elon musk. I wanted to find out how musk� s vision was playing out on the inside. A Senior Engineer responsible for the Computer Code that powers twitter agreed to meet me. Because he still works there, hes asked us to conceal his identity, so were calling him � sam. Sam says elon musk� s relaxed public persona wasnt replicated Inside Twitter hq. Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards, very bulky, tall, Hollywood Movie bodyguards that follow him around. Even when he goes to the restroom. Ive been working in Silicon Valley for such a long time. Ive seen people with the same level of status, wealth, whatever they dont have any security. They are comfortable with people who are around them. Musk was certainly comfortable with his then 118 million twitter followers, repeatedly asking their views on how he should run twitter. Should twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, he asked, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam . 72 said yes. The people have spoken, musk tweeted. Amnesty begins next week. Bang out the machete, boom in herface, grab her by the neck, shut up, bitch andrew tate is back on twitter andrew tate a former kickboxer turned social media personality made a high profile return to the site. A sheikh sent us a cake. Hed been permanently banned in 2017, after tweets that included saying women whove been raped should bear some responsibility for being assaulted. It wasnt just the misogynists who were back conspiracy theorists and other extremists were also allowed to return. Twitter users have been in touch with me about this, too. These White Supremacists have proliferated, their hate has burgeoned. Ive been receiving a brutal barrage of trolls online. Its awash with fake news, itjust is. As musk was inviting controversial users back on to twitter, he was thinking of getting rid of many of his 7,500 staff. He brought in maybe 20, 30 tesla engineers to review the code, and based on that decided on the performance of Something Like more than 3,000 engineers. Sackings followed many in teams working to keep the platform safe. Well, that leaves room for much more risk, more possibilities of things that can go wrong. Inside twitter, confusion was spreading. Senior employees were struggling to understand who was in charge. One of the first things that happened whenever the acquisition finished so you didnt know who you reported to or who was in the company anymore. Mostly, it was like messaging people to see if they were still there. And if you got silence, you assumed they werent. So it was a kind of a mystery, a kind of a chaotic kind of. Like a puzzle. A puzzle, like, how do we reassemble the company from whos left after we figure out whos left . The twitter employees i met in San Francisco all recognised that twitter had never been perfect. But it had been trying to make the platform safer for users. One feature lisa Jennings Young and her team had designed used software to scan tweets and then nudge users, asking if they were sure they wanted to post. Were asking tweeters to review replies with potentially harmful or offensive language. Want to take another look before tweeting . Lisa says twitter� s own Research Suggests the harmful Reply Nudge Feature had a significant effect on users behaviour. So, overall, 60 of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance via the nudge, which is huge, huge, huge. But what was more interesting is that after we nudged people once, they composed 11 fewer harmful replies in the future. Ive reported many times on the damage hate filled content on twitter can cause. Ive been bombarded with it myself. Julie posetti from the International Center forjournalists has been analysing the messages directed at me. We can see in april 2021 a massive spike in abuse against you, which was connected to your reporting on covid 19 disinformation. Then we see in january 2022, a real reduction in the abuse that youre experiencing, and that period, of course, coincides with the impact of some of the anti abuse measures, some of the Safety Measures that twitters teams have been implementing. I also remember at that time actually really noticing that it felt like i was receiving less abuse. Yes. Working with sheffield university, julies team looked at three periods the first in early 2021, the second in 2022, and the third after elon musk took over. We can directly compare the Second Period with the third period. Were looking at the same time frame a year later, and so here, we can see in 2023 that you were starting to experience an escalation in the obvious abuse that is being detected. In fact, specifically after elon musk took over, the Online Violence directed at you picked up by our tools has more than tripled. In mid november last year, musk issued his remaining staff with an ultimatum via email. The subject line read, a fork in the road. Going forward, to build a breakthrough twitter 2. 0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, you will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. If you are sure that you want to be part of the new twitter, please click yes on the link below. The link only had the option to click yes. Ray serrato decided not to click yes and no longer works at twitter. He and his team of 2a had been working to prevent state sponsored attempts to undermine democracy or influence elections. And how frequently were you identifying these kinds of suspicious activities . Daily. I dont think its exaggeration to say that that team did that work daily. Does that team still exist at twitter . It exists in a minimised capacity. There are a number of key experts that are no longer in that team that would have covered special regions or threat actors from russia to china. Influence operations are not going to stop. In fact, one can reasonably suspect that they will increase, given thats Public Knowledge that the team has been decimated. Helen sage lee also worked to protect elections. She found out shed been let go while working late one night. I remember it was around 9 15. I refreshed my email inbox just to see if anything else had come up. I try to log in, and my email is just not working any more. And i had just lost complete access, and thats when i knew that i had been laid off. Helen sage and others are now suing twitter over severance pay. Shed lost herjob at a crucial time when elections were due across the us. Together with her team, shed been identifying fake accounts suspected of spreading misinformation. I was thinking, what would happen to the job that i was currently tasked with doing . Did the rest of my team also get laid off . And some of these are projects that were meant to help the user and to really ensure the safety of the user. So you naturally ask the question, what will happen to all those projects . The company was shedding expertise assembled to stop twitter being misused. Musk� s vision was for twitter to be protected by ai more than people. There was a lot of emphasis on writing code. And that isnt everything we do. We have to keep things running as well as write code. If you keep reducing the people, or the people who support the tools who support the people, then at some point things willjust break and nobody will know how to fix it. Are your team who worked on that harmful reply nudge, are they still at twitter . No. The entire Content Design Team was laid off except for me. So i was the one person remaining after that. Soon after her team was sacked, lisa resigned. And what does that mean for Something Like the nudge . Is it still happening . Is there anyone working on it . No. Theres no one there to work on that at this time. We decided to do a little experiment using a private profile to see if the harmful reply nudge still worked. All twitter employees are lazy losers, bleep off and die. And should this be automatically picked up . It should yeah, yeah. Oh, good it came up im so glad its still working. Most tweeters dont post replies like this. Then lisa suggested another tweet that she wouldve expected to trigger a nudge. Twitter employees are lazy losers, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and die. 0k. No nudge. Interesting. Would you have expect the harmful reply nudge to appearfor messages like that, calling for someone to die, for example . I would have. That wouldve been my expectation. Of course, i dont know if anythings changed, but that would have been my expectation, it would have caught that. I asked engineer sam, whos still working at twitter, if he knew whatd happened to the harmful reply nudge. The feature is out there, but there are so many things broken and theres Nobody Taking Care of it, so you see this, like, inconsistent behaviour. For someone on the inside, its like a building where all the pieces are on fire. When you look at it from the outside, the facade looks fine. But i can see that nothing is working. Its not only abusive messages and disinformation. Paedophiles use twitter to groom children and post images of abuse. This former employee, who were calling rory, used to work in a team tasked with preventing Child Sexual Exploitation and reporting offenders to the police. Were talking of actual contact abuse or, you know, people sharing the worst of the worst material. How prevalent was that kind of material on twitter . How much of a problem was it . Oh, it was phenomenally prevalent. Every day you would be able to identify that sort of material. Elon musk has said hes committed to tackling this kind of content. Removing Child Exploitation is priority 1. Please reply in comments if you see anything that twitter needs to address. But after the takeover, rory says his team was drastically cut. You cant go from a team of 20 to a team of about six or seven and be able to keep on top of the Child Sexual Exploitation problem on the platform. Did musk ever speak directly to you and your team . No. Did you receive any communications from him . No. From the management . No. Why do you think that is . Who knows . But you cant take over a company and suddenly believe you have the knowledge of being able to deal with Child Sexual Exploitation without having the experts in place. Twitter says it removed 400,000 accounts in one month alone to help make twitter safer. But rory� s worried that some users are no longer being reported to the police. You can by all means suspend hundreds of thousands of accounts in a month. Most of the users who had their accounts suspended would just set up a new account anyway, so it wasnt unusual to see people saying, this is my fifth, sixth, seventh plus account. They will be aware of whats going on, so theyll be having a field day. By mid december last year, having let go of about half of his staff, musk then suggested he might go too. He put his fate in the hands of his twitter followers. Should i step down as head of twitter . He wrote. I will abide by the results of this poll. 17. 5 million users voted, and 57 said yes. But today, musk is still in charge. We want to do an interview with elon musk, and we reached out to him through his other companies and also through his Facebook Page weeks ago. Since then weve also been in touch with the Twitter Press office, and weve also tweeted him, but we havent heard anything back. So weve decided were going to take a leaf out of his book and see what twitter users want. Should elon musk do an interview with Marianna Spring for bbc panorama . This twitter vote is of course totally unscientific, and elon musk can ignore it if he wants. But i thought it might be a way of getting his attention. The results are due in 2a hours. In the four months since the elon musk takeover, the accounts hes reinstated on twitter have been thriving. Although andrew tate is currently in custody in romania on suspicion of rape and human trafficking, that hasnt harmed his twitter profile he has more than five million followers. For Rape Survivor ellie, allowing the likes of andrew tate back has had a real impact. Ive had a look through some of the accounts that have targeted me, and, you know, you can see their likes and so on and so forth, and there have definitely been people that are supportive of andrew tate. I know that he has this sort of army of fans that want to defend him every second, and i think these people probably spend a lot of time online looking at women that criticise him or women that, you know, arejust trying to speak out against misogyny in general. New research shared with panorama shows theres been a spike in the appetite for harmful material. We were able to establish the Account Creation dates of the Seven Million followers of known abusive and harassing accounts online. We saw huge spikes of Account Creation around several notable events during elon musk� s Twitter Takeover, but also related to the known online misogynistic influence of andrew tate. When comparing the period before musk� s takeover and after, we see a 69 increase in the overall level of Account Creation of those following known abusive misogynistic accounts. Dr posetti believes musk� s amnesty on previously banned accounts has helped fuel the uptick in abusive tweets directed at me. This emboldenment occurs when the person who now owns the platform signals, its ok mate, say what you like, were more tolerant of that kind of thing now, which is what weve heard. Thats an entreaty to do and say what you want, you know, and to do so with impunity. The amnesty on banned accounts was the final straw for members of the trust and safety council. Anne and two of her colleagues resigned. Theres a major impact on reinstating people who engage in misogyny and hate speech and, you know, anti gay speech and, you know, bigotry and all of these sort of categories of hate that were now exposed to on twitter. A week later, musk decided he no longer needed the trust and safety council. Its 80 or so members were told in an email their advice was no longer wanted. I still hadnt heard anything back from elon musk. And my online vote was about to close. The results are in, and its a yes. Over 40,000 twitter users voted, and 89 of them said they would like elon musk to do an interview with me. Despite my efforts to get in touch, elon musk didnt respond to any of the points raised in the programme. However, he tweeted about the programme saying, sorry for turning twitter from Nurturing Paradise into place that has. Trolls. The takeover of the platform has been a huge media event, and theres been a circus that has surrounded it. I think this has meant that sensible conversations around striking balances online between safety and expression, about what the appropriate mandate of moderation is and what the role of platforms is in Dictating A Civic Discourse has been lost amid the sort of celebrification of the platform. For millions around the world, twitter is part of their national conversation. Why is twitter important . Well, its kind of unique in the world at this point. It has been described as a common space, the worlds public forum. Theres not really anything that quite replaces it. What happens on the platform matters. We really need to see twitter invest in these teams instead of turning their back on their responsibility to children. Its an absolute Dumpster Fire of misinformation. It makes victims feel horrific stalking,. Harassment, trolling. Twitter says defending and respecting the users voice remains one of its core values. After musk took over, some predicted many users would defect to other social media platforms. Some have, but the majority remain. Elon musk� s twitter storm still rages. Those in the eye of that storm are the users. What would you say to elon musk if you had the opportunity . I would ask, why are these accounts that are bullying and harassing people still allowed on the platform . I would like him to read some of the messages that ive been sent and tell me why those accounts are still allowed to be on twitter. All welcome to bbc news im lisa marie misztak. Our top stories two of the four americans kidnapped in Northern Mexico on monday have been found dead, refocusing attention on Gang Violence in the country. The white house says it supports a bipartisan bill in congress that will give President Biden new powers to ban the chinese owned app, tiktok, in the us. The romance scams that cost people thousands of dollars the bbc speaks to former gang members. Britains Prime Minister says hes Up For The Fight to bring in new legislation to prevent migrants crossing the channel the Un Refugee Agency says it will punish asylum seekers. People must know that if they come here
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