- Eirliani Abdul Rahman is a former member of Twitter's Trust and Safety Council.
- Abdul Rahman and two other members resigned earlier this month, and Twitter disbanded the council days later.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Eirliani Abdul Rahman and has been edited for length and clarity. Abdul Rahman is the co-founder of Youth, Adult Survivors & Kin In Need (YAKIN) and a former member of Twitter's Trust and Safety Council. Earlier this month, she resigned from the council, which Twitter later disbanded via email less than an hour before the group was scheduled to meet.
I loved Twitter as a platform because I felt it was so unique, and even today I don't think there's any equivalent. You can tweet at anyone. You can talk to anyone. It doesn't matter how many followers you have. And it's the most democratic platform in that way.
I felt like we on the council were not being heard. There was no outreach to us since Musk's takeover. I was quite taken aback by the disbanding, given the timing and the nature in which it happened. There should have been a conversation between the new management and council members before making such a decision. The way it was done left a lot to be desired.
I like the idea of a public town square that Elon Musk has mentioned, but content moderation is very complex. And I think we can see the friction now between what Musk thinks he can do and the actual reality of content moderation.
I'm of the view that the platform isn't safe any more. The numbers, from groups like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League, showing a rise in hate speech are really a cause for concern.
It's not the Twitter I signed up for. You can see it's very different now and it represents a different way of looking at things. How will content moderation be done? Will it be entirely automated? What about trusted partners on the ground who can help with the nuances and contextualization that is necessary for this work?
Content moderation is complex — he can't lay off the people who work on it and just do it by automation. The platform needs to be able to fix things quickly and not just react, but also be proactive and then reach out to trusted partners. All that is a big part of content moderation, it's not as simple as a static process.
I really admire Musk because of what he's done with SpaceX and Tesla, but I feel that the way he brings in some of those operating principles into Twitter, it doesn't quite work. I think it's worrisome that he's making major decisions by running polls and tweeting, "Should I do this?"
As for Twitter Blue, I understand the need to monetize, but Musk's approach means the people who can afford to pay $8 a month for verification will have a better experience on Twitter than those who can't, and then that's not really a democratic platform anymore. And you shouldn't be able to buy credibility in the first place.
Looking back, I'm very proud of the work we did on the council. I feel like there's an exodus from Twitter happening now, and I'm sad about it. There's no equivalent to Twitter for its democratic value and what you can do with it.
We'll see what happens with the new changes. I don't know what the future of Twitter looks like, but I don't think it will bode very well if Musk continues to run it the way he's doing it right now.