Twitter dissolves Trust and Safety Council

6:37 am Tuesday, December 13th, 2022

By Sheila Dang

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc on Monday disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group formed in 2016 to advise the social media platform on site decisions, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.

About half of the social media site’s workforce – around 3,700 employees – have been laid off since Elon Musk took charge of the company and introduced a cost-cutting drive.

More than a 1,000 have resigned, among them Yoel Roth, the company’s former head of trust and safety.

“As Twitter moves into a new phase, we are reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this,” an email sent to the Trust and Safety Council members, seen by Reuters, said.

A Twitter page for the group has been deleted.

The council comprised of various civil rights organizations, academics and other bodies that advocated for safety and advised Twitter as it developed products, programs, and rules, according to a web archive for the page.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” the email from Twitter said.

The email from Twitter arrived less than an hour before members of the council were expecting to meet with company executives via Zoom, the Washington Post reported earlier.

Last week, three members of the Council resigned citing concern for the safety of Twitter users.

“It is clear from research evidence that, contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline,” council member Anne Collier had tweeted.

Musk had responded on the micro blogging site accusing council members of refusing to take action on child exploitation, a claim former CEO Jack Dorsey said was “false”.

(Reporting by Sneha Bhowmik and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee)