Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the auto awards “Das Goldene Lenkrad” (The golden steering wheel) given by a German newspaper in Berlin, Germany, November 12, 2019.
Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
Days after closing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk faced pressure from heads of civil rights groups to disallow many users who had been banned from the platform from returning, and to provide company staffers access to the tools essential to combat election-related misinformation.
Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Asian American Foundation and Free Press, a media reform advocacy group, spoke with Musk in an almost hour-long Zoom call on Tuesday, one week before the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, helped organize the decision after speaking with Musk previously, and took part within the meeting, in keeping with three of the attendees.
A few of the organizations represented have co-signed an open letter to Twitter’s advertisers to encourage them to “stop all promoting on Twitter globally if he [Musk] follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”
Bloomberg reported that some employees had been frozen out of their access to tools used for content moderation and policy enforcement, which could impact the corporate’s ability to eliminate misinformation on Election Day. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, defended the move as “exactly what we (or any company) must be doing within the midst of a company transition to scale back opportunities for insider risk.” He said Twitter remains to be enforcing its rules.
After the decision with civil rights groups, Musk tweeted that users who’ve been banned from Twitter for violating its rules — a gaggle that features former President Donald Trump — is not going to have the prospect to return to the platform for a minimum of one other few weeks. Prior reports suggested Musk was planning to permit individuals who’d been kicked off Twitter for disciplinary reasons to return back.
Musk told the group that he plans to retain and implement Twitter’s election integrity measures, and staff could have access to the essential tools by the top of this week, Free Press CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who was on the decision, said in an interview.
Michael Kives, a longtime Musk ally, was also on the decision, in keeping with the participants. Kives’ firm, K5 Global, has backed SpaceX and The Boring Company, two of Musk’s other corporations.
Musk was the one Twitter representative on the decision. Neither Musk nor Kives, who reportedly worked as a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, told CNBC on Wednesday that he urged Musk to implement a consistent process for letting people back onto Twitter.
Robinson said he “spoke to him [Musk] in regards to the folks that had incited violence and the message that it sends each to simply replatform them with no very clear and transparent process.” He also said that, when it allows people to return, Twitter should “take accountability, not only for what these folks do, but to the message it sends their followers.”
Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6 rebel on the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t mentioned by name on the decision, attendees said. But Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, said the group told Musk, “there are some people whose offenses are so egregious that they need to never be allowed back on the platform.” Johnson added, referring to Trump, that “I might hope that he’s never placed back on the platform because we might all be in peril.”
Musk said before he finalized his purchase of Twitter that it was a “mistake” to permanently ban Trump from the platform. But after the deal was accomplished, Musk quickly moved to reassure advertisers that Twitter wouldn’t change into a “free-for-all hellscape” simply because he favors more lenient content moderation policies.
Musk told advertisers he acquired Twitter because he believes it’s “vital to the longer term of civilization to have a typical digital town square, where a wide selection of beliefs might be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
The Tesla CEO said he plans to create a council at Twitter that can help review its content moderation approach. He said the group “will include representatives with widely divergent views, which is able to actually include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”
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