02/02/2024

Linda Yaccarino Says X Needs More Moderators After All

The company allegedly is hiring more trust and safety staffers

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, since rebranded as X, his favorite letter of the alphabet, he went on a firing spree. Chief among those ejected were people working on trust and safety, the work of keeping bad content, from hate speech to child exploitation, off the platform.

In front of a U.S. Senate committee today, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared to tacitly acknowledge that Musk went too far in tearing down the platform’s guardrails, indicating the company was partially reversing course. She said that X had increased the number of trust and safety staff by 10 percent in the past 14 months and planned to hire 100 new moderators in Austin focused on child sexual exploitation.

Yaccarino spoke at a Senate hearing called to discuss social networks’ failure to curb child sexual abuse, alongside the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord. She also said multiple times that "less than 1 percent" of X users were under 18. That claim—and her announcement that after 14 months of Musk’s ownership and deep cuts to trust and safety, the company was now hiring new moderators—raised the eyebrows of social platform experts and former Twitter employees.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.