Let me go ahead and break out that “pretends to be shocked” gif.
Apparently, Twitter’s users aren’t the only ones disappointed in the platform. Members of the company’s Trust and Safety Council say Twitter has been failing to keep them in the loop for months regarding policy changes, according to a Wired report.
Yesterday, Wired published a letter sent to Twitter’s staff earlier this week signed “Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council Members” that describes the lack of communication between the two as “embarrassing” and calls for talks with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
“There have been no advance heads-up of Twitter’s policy or product changes to the council, leaving many of us to have no prior warning or let alone knowledge when answering press and media inquiries,” the letter (which you can read in full here) states.
In the past few months, Twitter revised its policies with clearer language, shrinking its rules from 2500 words to fewer than 600, and later updated how the platform defines and moderates “hateful conduct”, a measure that purportedly failed to impress civil rights organisations.
Members of the Trust and Safety Council are not employees of Twitter, but rather a group of safety advocates, community groups and researchers the company collaborates with to help curb problems such as hate speech and harassment that have plagued its platform years.
Originally formed in 2016, the council hosts roughly 40 organisations and more than a dozen experts from around the world according to a blog post announcing its formation.
To Twitter’s credit, the letter begins by commending its collaboration with the council over the past two years. Council members had particularly high praise for the company’s annual Trust and Safety Council summit, calling last year’s “the best example of a way of working with safety partners within the entire industry”.
However, the letter goes on to describe a breakdown in communication not long after these events. The last groupwide update went out in December, the letter states, and the lack of news regarding any improvements or measures discussed at these summits has been frustrating.
And while some council members have purportedly received updates from corporate representatives, others have “heard absolutely nothing” from their regional Twitter contacts in 2019 so far, according to the letter.
So I suppose there is some solace in the fact that Twitter isn’t just ignoring some of its users’ calls to crack down on abuse; from the looks of this letter, the hellsite may even be ignoring the very people it brought on board to do just that. And quite honestly, that’d explain a lot.
[Wired]