Former Twitter employee warns that massive layoffs of Twitter security staff and reliance on automation could help regimes like China silence critics



Elon Musk, who completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, is conducting a large-scale workforce reduction, dismissing two-thirds of Twitter's employees. It is feared that this large-scale personnel reduction will make it difficult for activists criticizing the administration to speak on Twitter due to a significant reduction in the number of security staff responsible for Twitter management and an increase in reliance on automation.

Twitter Is Shutting Down Chinese Activists' Accounts – Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitter-elon-musk-china-dissidents-1234643726/

The Chinese government has announced a 'zero corona policy' to thoroughly control citizens' outings with the aim of suppressing the spread of the new coronavirus. However, this zero-corona policy greatly restricted the freedom of citizens and had a major impact on the economy, so there were voices opposing this zero-corona policy in various places. And from the student movement to mourn the fire in Nanjing, where lifesaving was delayed due to the zero-corona policy and caused enormous damage, the A4 Revolution called for criticism of the Chinese government by holding up a clean A4 paper. ' is happening all over the world.

Meanwhile, author and comedian Vicky Wang said, ``To those who say Twitter is over (with Musk's acquisition). It may be to amplify the voices of the demonstrators who demand freedom, ”he said, sharing information about an online meeting for those participating in protests against the Chinese government.

Immediately after that, Mr. Wang's Twitter account was frozen, and the account of the person who participated in or supported the protest was also suspended. Mr. Wang and his colleagues explained that the reason they were frozen from Twitter was because they violated the ' Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy '.



Like many social media platforms, Twitter allows users to report posts that violate its rules regarding abusive content, spam, and copyright infringement. These reports typically relied on staff to assess their validity and decide whether to take enforcement action against the reporter's account. Rolling Stone, an American information magazine, said that until now, employees in the 'Trust and Safety' department responsible for Twitter's security had decided whether to freeze or not. It explains that problems such as account freezes due to false reports occurred because almost all members were dismissed and moderation relied on automation.

A former employee of Twitter's trust and safety division told Rolling Stone, 'Most of the automated moderation is based on experience based on English and Chinese keywords, not just on account technical information and provenance. All the people who can speak Chinese and who have been doing moderation work related to China have left the company.”

Former employees have expressed concern that understaffing and reliance on automation will make it easier for authoritarian states and sophisticated cyber attackers to use the content reporting system to kick critics off Twitter.

In the past, an Islamic conservative network in Bangladesh sent a copyright violation report to more than 20 fan accounts under the name of the K-POP group BTS official, and there was an incident that caused a temporary freeze. Similar to this case, the Chinese government may come up with a strategy to freeze the accounts of dissidents by falsely reporting them.

A former Twitter employee also confessed to harassment of Australian-Chinese journalist Vicky Shu. Mr. Shu has criticized the Chinese government's oppression in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region , and it seems that his Twitter account has been flooded with death threats and harassment tweets from spam accounts, so Mr. Shu temporarily paused his activities on Twitter. I had to. It is believed that this spam account is being vandalized by the pro-Chinese vandalism network `` Spamouflage Dragon '', which has been pointed out to be connected to the Chinese government. According to former employees, Mr. Shu's harassment was a mixture of genuine Chinese nationalist harassment and Spamouflage Dragon harassment.



Also, regarding the blank paper revolution, it has already been reported that a large amount of pornographic advertisements are posted on Twitter to make it difficult to collect information about the protest demonstrations in China.

China's pornographic ads exploded on Twitter, aiming to hide large-scale protest demonstrations from overseas eyes - GIGAZINE



In addition, according to Rolling Stone, based on previous research, Twitter needs to update the automatic moderation system set up to counter China's use of influence to prevent similar situations from happening. It argues that there is, and it seems that he was planning to publish the survey results before the acquisition by Mr. Musk.

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