How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

> but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore.

Twitter has publicly laid off about 75% of its staff fairly evenly across the entire company. We don't have exact counts of employees, but we know how many employees the company used to have, and we know roughly how many were fired.

So now look at job postings; has Twitter put out calls to hire thousands of moderators to replace those people? No.

> Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue

Sure, whatever, you can debate anything you'd like. But you're going to have a hard time getting people to humor you or take you seriously. If your argument is that actually Twitter hasn't slashed its staff and there are tons of moderators and that all of the reports about it are false, then you're not arguing a coherent enough position to take seriously.

> The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams.

When you are doing human moderation specifically, raw numbers matter. A human being can only physically review a finite number of abuse reports a day, and as they are stretched more and as they are pressured to make faster decisions, their accuracy goes down. This is generally agreed on by pretty much everyone -- which is exactly why Twitter was criticized in the past for its moderation approaches.

Twitter's moderation teams (which were heavily reliant on contractors who didn't get the perks you're talking about in the first place) were understaffed before Elon took over. The article we are talking under directly calls this out as a problem.

So no, you can't fire most of those people and not replace them and expect the remaining people to be better at moderation, it just doesn't work that way. Human moderation means that at some point in the process, a human being needs to physically look at the content being reported and make an informed decision. That requires raw numbers.

> would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers?

Twitter's legal team did often show up to court. Why do you think I'm praising them? Yes, I know that many legal teams in corporations don't get involved in actual cases that often, that's why Twitter's legal team deserves some level of praise for being different.

> This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team.

Twitter's legal team was not perfect, but they were uncharacteristically aggressive about preserving anonymity compared to other social media companies. I'm not talking about just taking objections to the government, Twitter's legal team has literally sued the government on behalf of individual users before.

Again, not perfect. But noticeably aggressive about this stuff beyond what many of their competitors were doing.

> and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was. [...] I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things

I feel like you're conflating Twitter's legal team with every single other team on the platform? Do you think that Twitter's lawyers were specifically responsible for every bad moderation decision that the company made? Twitter's lawyers were not in charge of hiring moderators or deciding what resources they would get. They weren't in charge of deciding Twitter's overall moderation direction, you are thinking of management and heads of safety.

Once again, you don't have to like Twitter's legal team. Are you able to recognize that regardless of whether or not you like the legal team Twitter used to have, it is still important for free speech that Twitter have a proactive legal team today that isn't jumping between multiple companies? The problem isn't that Musk people fired people, the problem is that he didn't follow that up by hiring.

I don't particularly care if Musk feels good about existing staff. It's just foolish for his followup to firing people not to be to bring in qualified replacements.

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> That is actually false

It is actually not. Twitter's overall moderation teams are smaller than than they used to be, and that has included the dissolving (and near-dissolving) of specific CSAM teams, and severing ties with a ton of contractors. Now, I'm sure that Musk would argue he's just merged teams together or given people shared responsibilities. But I will point out that doubling up responsibilities for CSAM moderation teams is also stretching them thin.

You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. Who has been hired to replace the heads of child safety that were fired? What contractors have been brought in to replace the contractors that Twitter severed ties with? You don't think Musk would be bragging about those job postings and hires if they existed?

As a piece of history, Twitter tried to launch an OnlyFans competitor in pre-Musk days and the project was scrapped in part because Twitter acknowledged internally at the time that it did not have resources to do CSAM moderating at the scale necessary to support that platform. Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators specifically for handling CSAM, that problem hasn't changed.

Shuffling people around wouldn't be enough to fix that problem even if Musk had the people available to shuffle around. Which to be clear, he literally doesn't, Twitter's employee count across the board including its moderation teams is a fraction of what it used to be.

What moves him into probable deception for me is that he wasn’t just repeatedly wrong about everything of substance but that his errors were always aligned with something which made him money. Botching the methodology on the paper you’re using to argue for removing safeguards is bad but it’s worse not to mention that you were funded by one of the industries affected.

> I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.

I would consider it something which didn’t happen to him. Being blocked from trending based on his history of bad advice may not be something you like but it‘s nowhere near deplatforming unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.

I never saw any shady asks when I was there, but my field was different. Name dropping FBI got people to jump through whatever hoops 100% of the time. My bias may come from asking willing folks things that were legal.

My point was simply that when you come in with that kind of authority, people often just follow orders and don’t push back. That’s a powerful stick to wield and should be wielded responsibly.

In my review of the twitter files, this was not done in every case.

I championed nothing. I merely proposed that listening to alternative viewpoints on controversial topics is now something that is now on the table for me.

Literally a Strawman.

Sorry, I don't think that's right. The CDC were terrible at messaging. It constantly sounded like they flip flopped, came up with absurd requirements. What's worse so many Americans took what they said as dogma, and massively attacked anyone who questioned their nonsense.

From https://reason.com/2022/02/07/that-study-of-face-masks-does-...

"A study[1] published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly shows that wearing a face mask in public places dramatically reduces your risk of catching COVID-19. The CDC summed up the results in a widely shared graphic[2] that says wearing a cloth mask "lowered the odds of testing positive" by 56 percent, while the risk reduction was 66 percent for surgical masks and 83 percent for N95 or KN95 respirators.

If you read the tiny footnotes, you will see that the result for cloth masks was not statistically significant. So even on its face, this study, which was published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, did not validate the protective effect of the most commonly used face coverings—a striking fact that the authors do not mention until the end of the sixth paragraph.

In 2020, the CDC went from dismissing the value of general mask wearing[3] to describing it as "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." In September 2020, then–CDC Director Robert Redfield asserted[4], without any evidence, that masks were more effective at preventing infection than vaccines would prove to be. Even before the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, Redfield's successor, Rochelle Walensky, implied the same thing, exaggerating[5] the evidence supporting mask use in a way that made vaccination seem inferior."

So even in 2022, they are misleading the public.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/social-media/mm7106e1...

[3] https://reason.com/2020/04/06/the-cdcs-revised-face-mask-adv...

[4] https://reason.com/2020/09/17/suggesting-that-face-masks-are...

[5] https://reason.com/2021/11/09/the-cdcs-director-implies-that...