On Monday night, what is left of the trust and safety team at X (formerly Twitter) announced the measures it was taking to try and put the genie back in the bottle and curb the virulent spread of disinformation around the Israel-Hamas war on its platform.
The statement, issued three days after the conflict began, reads: “As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company leadership group has assessed this moment as a crisis requiring the highest level of response.”
One person who does not appear to be part of this crisis team is X owner and main character on his own platform, Elon Musk.
Instead of tackling the dangerous disinformation problem on his platform, Musk instead spent Monday night into Tuersday morning continuing to spread disinformation about the conflict, conversing with a known QAnon promoter, boosting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and laughing at video detailing how transphobic content on X can get you a lot of new followers.
Musk also promoted a new feature that allows X Premium subscribers to only see replies from other people willing to pay $8 a month, which Musk said would “help a lot with spam bots” on the platform—an issue Musk previously claimed he had already all but eradicated.
“If successful, X will evolve to be the collective consciousness of humanity or, more accurately, the human-machine collective,” Musk tweeted in reply to a follower who said he was doing a great job running the company.
Meanwhile, disinformation about the conflict in the Middle East continues to rage on the platform, driven primarily by verified accounts.
On Monday evening, Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, which is currently leaderless after Ella Irwin resigned in June, wrote on X that it had “removed newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts” and was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)—an industry body that helps coordinate content moderation across social media platforms—to “try and prevent terrorist content from being distributed online.”
The Safety team’s statement also lauded the user-generated Community Notes system and said new accounts were being enrolled to address the flood of disinformation on the platform. The Safety team also revealed that it had removed “several hundreds accounts for attempting to manipulate trending topics.”
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