Sensitive content… Graphic images showing victims of the deadly shooting at a Texas mall began circulating on Twitter over the weekend, and some content was still up on Monday. The content is against Twitter’s stated policies prohibiting “gratuitous gore,” specifically “dismembered or mutilated humans.”
- Twitter’s problem: NYT journalist Benjamin Mullin said the images were “less prominent” on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and searches on those platforms mostly surfaced news articles and less sensitive eyewitness content. Meanwhile, Twitter users said the images flooded their feeds.
Under Elon’s reign… Musk has made sweeping changes to Twitter since becoming CEO, including affecting the platform’s ability to moderate content with algorithms and with humans catching sensitive material that gets into users’ feeds.
Missing moderators: While Meta and YouTube have invested heavily in hiring large teams of moderators, Twitter laid them off as part of mass cuts initiated by Musk. Last month, the EU told Twitter it needed to hire more moderators to comply with a new set of digital safety rules.
Technical tweaks: Users who pay for a premium (checkmark) Twitter subscription get their content algorithmically prioritized above free accounts, and users say that’s helped surface images of the shooting, especially in the “For You” feed added in January.
Not all costs are cuttable… Musk has focused on steep cost cuts (including selling Twitter HQ’s furniture) and revenue-boosting initiatives (like subscriptions) to revive Twitter’s finances. But the rapid belt-tightening may’ve missed a notch somewhere. The company’s revenue reportedly plummeted 40% from December 2021 to last year, mainly because of advertisers exiting the platform en masse… largely over content moderation.