Twitter is less secure because of Elon Musk’s leadership style, says former top official
CNN Business
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Twitter owner Elon Musk’s dictatorial management style risks driving the company headlong into unforced business losses, content moderation disasters and the degradation of core platform features that help keep vulnerable users safe, according to a former top Twitter official who led the company̵[ads1]7;s content moderation before abruptly stepping down. this month.
The social media company’s failed rollout of a paid verification feature “is an example of a disaster that slipped through” amid the chaos Musk brought to Twitter, and the prospect of further disaster made it impossible to stay, said Yoel Roth, the company’s former head of site integrity , during an onstage interview with journalist Kara Swisher on Tuesday in his first public appearance since quitting Twitter on Nov. 10.
Roth and other colleagues tried to warn Musk of the “obvious” problems in his plan to offer a verified tick to any user who paid $8 a month. But Musk pushed through through sheer willpower anyway, leading to a wave of new impostor accounts posing as big brands, athletes and other verified users that soon forced Twitter to suspend the feature.
“It went off the rails in exactly the ways we expected,” Roth said.
The public reflections of a senior Twitter executive who was close to Musk in the raw, early days of his ownership of the company — a period marked by internal tumult and a damaging advertiser revolt — provide the latest evidence of a billionaire CEO leading the his gut at the expense of practically everyone else.
There was no explosive confrontation with Musk that led to Roth’s resignation, and the episode involving Twitter’s paid verification feature was just one of many factors that drove Roth’s decision to leave, he said. But the experience exemplified the kind of damage Musk’s freewheeling approach can do, Roth added, likening his final weeks at the company to standing in front of a leaking dam, desperately trying to plug the holes but knowing something would eventually pass him by.
In the hour-long interview, Roth warned Musk’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation, and his lack of a transparent process for creating and enforcing platform policies, has made Twitter less safe, in part because there aren’t enough employees left who understand that malicious actors are constantly trying to game the system in ways that automated algorithms don’t know how to catch them.
“People don’t sit still,” he said. “They are actively inventing new ways to be horrible on the internet.”
He urged Twitter users to monitor the operation of key security features such as muting, blocking and protected tweets as early warnings that the platform may break down.
“If protected tweets stop working, run,” he said.
For two weeks after Musk closed the purchase of Twitter, Roth presented himself as a voice of stability and calm at the center of a company undergoing dramatic change. Roth knew that by remaining with the company, Musk was using him to keep advertisers from leaving the platform. But Roth also suggested that he and others who did not leave Twitter may have been able to influence Musk and prevent him from making damaging unilateral decisions, which he had “multiple opportunities” to do.
Even while he spent his first days in the new regime Fight against a “surge in hateful behavior on Twitter” apparently intended to test Musk’s tolerance for racism and anti-Semitism on the platform, Roth sought to reassure the public that Twitter’s trust and security efforts continued unhindered.
He shared data about the platform’s ongoing enforcement effortsand downplayed the impact of Twitter’s mass layoffs on its content moderation team, saying the job cuts were less severe in that department compared to the broader organization.
As recently as November 9, Roth spoke alongside Musk during a public Twitter Spaces event intended to persuade advertisers not to flee the platform. In the hour-long session, which was attended by more than 100,000 listeners, including representatives of Adidas, Chevron and other big brands, Roth sounded optimistic about Twitter’s plans to combat hate speech.
The very next day, Roth abruptly resigned, joining a number of other top executives, including Twitter’s chief privacy officer and chief information security officer.
In a subsequent New York Times statement, Roth said the reason for leaving came down to Musk’s highly personal and improvisational approach to content moderation. Roth’s essay accused Musk of maintaining a “lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and statements on Twitter about Twitter’s rules.”
On Tuesday, Roth said the popular narrative portraying Musk as a villain is wrong and does not reflect his own experiences with him. But, he said, Musk surrounds himself with those who rarely challenge him.
Before Musk took over Twitter, Roth wrote down several commitments to himself that would trigger the decision to quit. One limit, he said — one that was never reached — was that Roth would refuse to lie to Musk. Another limit, one that was eventually reached and drove his decision to resign, was “if Twitter starts to be governed by dictatorial edicts rather than by a policy.”
Roth’s role at Twitter came under intense scrutiny in 2020 after the company added a fact-check message to false tweets from then-US President Donald Trump.
Tweets that Roth sent in 2016 and 2017 that were critical of President Trump and his supporters were unearthed and used to argue that Roth and Twitter were biased against the president.
Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read: “I’m just saying, we’re flying over those states that voted for a racist mandarin for a reason.”
Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for corporate decisions.”
When Roth was still working at Twitter in October, Musk was asked about Roth’s old tweets.
“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My feeling is that he has high integrity and we’re all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.
Roth also became the personal face of Twitter, and a target of harassment, after the company decided to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden, a decision that then-CEO Jack Dorsey has since said was a mistake.
“It’s been widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. That’s not true. That’s absolutely, unequivocally untrue,” Roth told Swisher on Tuesday.
Roth did not feel it was appropriate to remove the content from Twitter, he said, but at the time the story appeared to bear the hallmarks of a hack-and-leak intelligence operation.
Roth also said Tuesday that in retrospect suppressing the Hunter Biden story was a mistake. But he defended Twitter’s other decisions to ban Trump for his activities surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, as well as a personal account belonging to Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and an account belonging to the satirical website Babylon Bee.
All three cases involved clear violations of Twitter’s publicly available, written policies, Roth said, making them a much clearer case for enforcement.
Amid layoffs that have decimated Twitter’s content moderation team, Musk has said he intends to rely much more on crowdsourced fact-checking of tweets to provide context to misleading claims. But Roth said that by doing so, Twitter risks abdicating its responsibility to the public, which should still apply despite being a private company.
Policymakers should require platforms to share data with academics and researchers, he said, preventing privately owned platforms like Twitter from shirking a duty of transparency.
When asked to offer a simple piece of advice to Musk going forward, Roth paused for the briefest of moments.
“Humility goes a long way,” he said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
— CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan contributed to this report
