No matter what resolution you file, he owns a 10 to 1 voting preference,” says Behar. Activist investors have previously filed resolutions to attempt to push Twitter, and other social media companies, towards objectives like more robust moderation policies and more environmentally friendly operations.Īndrew Behar, CEO of the nonprofit As You Sow, which represents a group of activist Twitter shareholders, says Twitter under Musk will likely look a lot like Meta (formerly Facebook) under Mark Zuckerberg.
“They had a version of their product that was bad for users, and it was in good faith that they were trying to figure out how to make it better,” says Wu.īy taking the company private, Musk would also eliminate the accountability that a board and shareholders can bring to a publicly traded company. Wu said she never got the sense that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team made decisions motivated by politics, a claim levied at the platform by some of its critics. “He’s a billionaire version of the alt-right troll.”Īfter Twitter took action against her trolls, Wu continued to document harassment on the platform, particularly against women and members of marginalized communities, to share with Twitter.
To believe Musk would stand up for women and others targeted on the platform would be “foolish,” says Brianna Wu, a game developer and software engineer who was in contact with Twitter’s Trust and Safety team until 2020, after being targeted with abuse during the campaign of online harassment known as Gamergate in 2014. Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and president of GLAAD, a nonprofit that promotes LGBTQ rights and is also on Twitter’s advisory council, tweeted Monday that Musk’s ownership made her “nervous for the online safety of the LGBTQ community.” Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. Researchers who monitor right-wing extremists reported this week that individuals and groups previously banned from Twitter have already been attempting to return to the platform. She immediately received a stream of abuse from Musk fans on Twitter, prompting public complaints from some Twitter employees and the company’s former CEO Dick Costolo. On Tuesday, Musk used his Twitter account to single out one of the company’s top lawyers, Vijaya Gadde, by joining a thread criticizing her work policing the platform.
“The world will be worse off without Twitter as a dysfunctional but well-meaning place.” “I’m concerned about the social media version of the splinternet,” the employee says. Research indicates that online abuse already falls disproportionately on marginalized groups, suggesting that any increase in toxicity on Twitter likely would too. “Trolls are empowered,” another Twitter employee told WIRED, predicting that while the company will survive, the service may soon serve a much narrower community because it becomes hostile to many people who currently use Twitter. They say it would follow naturally from Musk’s stated aim of permitting a broader range of speech on the platform-not to mention the pugnacious example he sets with his own Tweets. “If you take away restrictions and let Twitter fill with hate speech, people aren’t going to want to come there anymore.”Ĭoncerns that Twitter is on the cusp of a new era marked by a significant uptick in abuse and harassment are shared by other company insiders, investors, and advisers to Twitter’s moderation policy teams. “There’s an insane amount of abuse against people of color and gay people, and literal Nazis on the platform, we have to block out,” says the employee, who works on Twitter’s business development team. For one employee watching, Musk’s public comments had already made the likely consequences clear: Twitter appeared poised to loosen content moderation, making it a less welcoming place for both users and advertisers. At a Twitter company meeting Monday about the decision to accept Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition offer, CEO Parag Agrawal avoided speculating on how its new owner might change the platform.