What the Twitter shake-up means for global development

Since Elon Musk’s roller-coaster acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion, he has laid off half of the company’s staff, dealing a major blow to efforts to curb harmful content, including disinformation, hate speech, and incitement of violence, former employees and experts say. The recent disbanding of the Trust and Safety Council has only fueled the impression that Twitter will now be less trustworthy and less safe. While only a tiny fraction of Twitter's 500 million daily tweets is problematic, according to Musk, this potential firehouse of unfiltered content could be especially damaging in low- and middle-income countries, or LMICs. Content moderation requires both machine learning and human review, said Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter who wrote and monitored algorithms for the content moderation team. “I don’t have Elon’s bird’s eye view of things at Twitter,” she told Devex. While content moderation was “far from perfect” prior to Musk’s takeover, it will be even tougher now with the staff that remains, said Ingle, who created algorithms based on local policies, language, and culture, flagging harmful tweets around the recent Brazilian and U.S. elections before she was fired last month. “He has stated publicly he only wants to ban calls to violence or things that are illegal,” she said. “In my opinion, even that cannot be handled.” In addition to gutting staff, Musk has introduced several policy changes that could have major implications for global health, international development, and humanitarian response — although given that Musk just took over the company in October, it may be too early to say how those implications will play out. Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” and thinks of Twitter as “the digital town square,” but experts told Devex the staff cuts that have seen the entire human rights team let go puts users in LMICs at particularly high risk. “If you've actually been to a public square, you know that there's infrastructure and personnel there to make sure that the space actually functions safely,” humanitarian activist Aanjalie Roane told Devex. “Without those things, it's really not a public square. It's kind of a bunch of people yelling at each other that has a tendency to dissolve into chaos.” Twitter did not immediately respond to Devex’s request for comment. 1. Hateful speech could rise. Researchers have found that hate speech such as racial and religious slurs on Twitter has jumped since Musk took over. Unfettered content on social media, including on Twitter, has fueled violence, from the civil war in Ethiopia to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. While Twitter had taken steps to address hate speech prior to Musk’s arrival, advocates such as Amnesty International urged the company to do more. “Over the last five years, Amnesty International has extensively documented Twitter’s failure to address hateful and abusive speech on the platform,” said Michael Kleinman, director of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley initiative. “Over that period of time, Twitter has taken small steps to address that problem, but it has never been enough.” All companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, he noted, citing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Roane, who works as a communications director for Médecins Sans Frontières in Canada but spoke to Devex in a personal capacity, said that the creation of the human rights team was a recognition that social media can have real-world implications. “Getting rid of it leaves a vacuum in their in-house expertise and analysis,” she said. But Twitter’s new vice president for trust and safety says the company is working to address problematic content. “For now, I think we are biasing towards moving quickly and figuring out the details in some of these areas after,” Ella Irwin recently told The Wall Street Journal. “If you were to tweet something that had some hateful slur in it, we may deamplify that tweet,” she told the paper. “You’re allowed to say it, but we don’t have to give you the reach of getting that out to every user on our platform.” 2. Past vulnerabilities could resurface. The vulnerabilities on the platform — such as the harassment of women, racist attacks, and the spread of misinformation — that activists had implored Twitter to fix are in danger of resurfacing, said Nanjala Nyabola, author of “Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya.” While Musk is from South Africa, some analysts say he’s showing little interest in how these changes to the platform affect the world beyond the West. “He's just not somebody who's shown that in his previous life that he knows or cares or thinks about African politics and the rise of authoritarianism on the continent,” Chipo Dendere, a professor of African politics at Wellesley College, told Devex. “So, I have very little confidence that Africa is a priority for Twitter right now.” For example, the move to grant verified status to anyone willing to pay an $8 fee, which was put on pause, led to a proliferation of fake accounts of real people, which is particularly dangerous in authoritarian regimes that could pay to appear more legitimate — or delegitimize their opponents. “Because they are not a priority, there's a real risk of reversion to some of the previous threats that people have been facing while using the site,” Nyabola said. Twitter executives had begun to address the concerns of activists. One example was the way the company treated the EndSARS protests in Nigeria in response to the alleged brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or SARS. Some analysts credited Twitter with amplifying the digital voices of the protesters. The platform created a special emoji for the protests and verified the accounts of the movement’s leaders which researchers say protected them against fake imitators on the platform. Former CEO and Co-founder Jack Dorsey also tweeted out the #EndSARS hashtag to his millions of followers, helping to globalize the demonstrations. “Helping people navigate and stay online during those protests was something that we hadn't seen,” Nyabola said. Likewise, the return of bots — new users with no profile photos, numbers instead of names on their profiles, and little to no followers — could be used against activists. Nyabola pointed out that Twitter had in the past taken steps to root out these types of fake accounts, notably in 2018 when it removed an estimated 70 million users suspected of being bots. But over the last few weeks, bot accounts have re-emerged, she noticed. “These are the kinds of profiles that are created in order to tilt the scales and in order to create an illusion of popularity, but also they can be easily weaponized,” she said. “They're also used by governments to drown out the content that people are putting up … stories that are critical of a specific government or a policy.” 3. Misinformation could be amplified. The spread of misinformation has already become a dangerous fixture in elections worldwide and could increase if controls are loosened. But misinformation also has serious implications for other areas. Nazanine Moshiri, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said she is concerned about the effects of misinformation on climate change and conflict in places such as East Africa, where she works. For example, the unchecked spread of lies on what causes persistent droughts in the region or malicious targeting of activists could set those causes back. “Looking at conflict, climate change, it's really important that you can moderate against misinformation, illegal content, etc., filter through what can be sort of harmful,” she said. Musk’s decision to no longer enforce Twitter’s longstanding COVID-19 misinformation policy could also set back efforts to vaccinate the many parts of the world that remain vulnerable to the coronavirus. But some have praised what they see as Musk’s efforts to increase transparency, as seen in the recent revelations of the “Twitter files” — showing internal deliberations over issues such as Hunter Biden’s laptop and former President Donald Trump’s tweets. While some argue that the files don’t reveal anything other than a normal debate over controversial posts, conservatives argue they show an anti-right bias among content moderators. ”Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” wrote journalist Matt Taibi. 4. Twitter will not be able to maintain its critical role in crisis response. The lack of human and technical infrastructure to prevent things such as misinformation has ripple effects beyond hateful and abusive speech, Tom Tarantino, Twitter’s former head of global crisis response, warned in a recent interview. The platform has become a critical tool during a range of crises, as citizens, humanitarian organizations, and governments tweeted in times of natural disasters or disease outbreaks. Now, with the heightened risk of impersonators or disinformation, these actors have lost that reliable way of communicating with the public, Tarantino said. “We’re in a dangerous place right now,” he told GovTech Magazine. “In terms of public safety, it's not a matter of if — it’s when a major public safety issue happens. Given the recent changes to the platform, it’s unlikely that Twitter will be able to support that functionality in the way it has done in the past.” Tarantino, who did not respond to request for comment from Devex, is one of the few former Twitter employees who has spoken out about the risks of these changes, as those who signed non-disclosure agreements are limited in what they can say. 5. The product could become less relevant for users. While Twitter, like so many social media giants, was founded in San Francisco, it had built up teams of people around the world that specialize in LMICs and could better understand the issues people in those countries care about. Now, many of those employees have been laid off or have chosen to leave. For example, Twitter laid off all but one of 12 employees at its only office on the African continent. That means an employee in California could have a hard time ensuring Twitter is useful and relevant to, say, a shopkeeper in Rwanda. "Silicon Valley is infamous for having a diversity challenge, where people who work in these companies are predominantly white straight men from upper-class backgrounds based here in the Bay Area, and it’s very hard to design products for people who are not like you unless you have the tools to do so,” said Zvika Krieger, who led responsible innovation at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and now consults with a range of companies on responsible innovation. “The smaller the team gets, the less range of diverse lived experiences you have amongst your employees, and fewer resources you have of people who can go out and understand what people need, and the ways in which products might harm people,” Krieger added. “If you’re designing a product, you want people all over the world to be using the product, and if you’re not investing resources in understanding your global audience so that their needs are not being met, people are just not going to want to use your product." Users may leave, but few alternatives remain — for now. These concerns, combined with the abandonment of the platform by influential voices, have led many to question whether it’s worth it to remain on the platform. But the paradox, according to Moshiri, who has previously worked as a journalist at Reuters, is whether there is a true alternative to Twitter, especially in places such as Africa where it has become an important tool for activism. After all, while Twitter has 250 million active users on any given day, a small fraction compared to other platforms like Facebook, it’s served a unique role for the communities that depend on it and so far it remains to be seen what could replace it. “I don't think there's any other platform … that would compare to Twitter at the moment, but I'm pretty positive that something will emerge,” she said.