Twitter is not safer under its new owner Elon Musk, its former head of trust and safety has said.
Yoel Roth, who resigned this month, said the social networking site had started to stray from adhering to publicly available policies towards decisions made by Musk alone.
“One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy… there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do.”
Many of the changes Musk has made have been “sudden and alarming for employees and users alike”, Mr Roth said in a New York Times opinion piece soon after his resignation.
The Tesla billionaire laid off roughly half of the company’s 8,000 workers, including 15% of the trust and safety department, Mr Roth tweeted at the time.
Musk’s ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter’s verification system allowed users to pay for a verified tick on their account, which Mr Roth said was done despite warnings and advice from his team.
Soon afterwards, the platform became a playground for spammers impersonating companies such as Nestle and Lockheed Martin.
Musk ‘must adhere’ to government rules on Twitter
Read more:
Musk defends culling Twitter staff
Twitter to launch gold ticks in ‘painful but necessary’ move
Musk to ‘unlock doors to Twitter jail’
Mr Roth also defended Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump from the site after the US Capitol riots on 6 January last year, citing the risk of further incitement of violence.
“We saw the clearest possible example of what it looked like for things to move from online to off,” he said.
“We saw people dead in the Capitol.”
Musk reinstated Mr Trump’s account two weeks ago after a slim majority voted in favour of the move in a surprise Twitter poll.
