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elon musk There was a plan to buy Twitter and roll back its content moderation policies. On Tuesday, just one day after he got it $44 billion deal to buy the company, Mr. Musk was already on his agenda. He tweeted that past moderation decisions by a top Twitter attorney were “clearly incredibly inappropriate”. He later shared a meme mocking the lawyer, fueling attacks from other Twitter users.

Mr. Musk’s personal critique was a rough reminder of what the employees were up against when it came to creating and enforcing Twitter’s complex contention moderation policies. Employees said his vision for the company would take it back to where it started and force Twitter to relive the past decade.

The Twitter executives who created the rules said they once held similar views to Mr. Musk about online conversation. They believed that Twitter’s policies should be limited to mimicking local laws. But grappling with violence, harassment, and election interference for more than a decade has changed their minds. Now, many executives at Twitter and other social media companies see content moderation policies as necessary measures to protect conversation.

The question is whether Mr Musk will also change his mind when faced with Twitter’s darkest corners.

“You said you wanted more ‘free speech’ and less control on Twitter. What does this mean in practice?” Twitter staffers wrote to an internal list of questions they hoped to ask Mr. Musk, seen by The New York Times.

Another question was asked: “Some people interpret your arguments in defense of free speech as a desire to reopen the door for harassment. Is this true? And if not, do you have ideas on how to both increase freedom of expression and keep the door closed against harassment?”

Mr. Musk was unimpressed by the warnings that his plans were misdirected. “The extreme antibody response of those who fear freedom of expression says it all,” he said on Twitter on Tuesday.

He continued to criticize the work of Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker, two of Twitter’s top lawyers. Ms. Gadde has been leading Twitter’s policy teams for more than a decade and has dealt with often complex moderation decisions, including the decision to impeach Donald J. Trump towards the end of his presidency. Baker, a former general counsel of the FBI, joined Twitter in 2020.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, did not directly respond to the criticism, but in a tweet, “We are proud of our people who continue to do the work with focus and urgency despite the noise.”

Employees of Twitter and other social media companies said Mr Musk understood little or didn’t care about the issues that led to Twitter’s content moderation approach and rules. Some of his suggestions, such as tagging automated accounts, were implemented before Mr. Musk launched his proposal.

“He’s basically buying the position of being a rule maker and a speech arbiter,” said David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California at Irvine and working with the United Nations on speech matters. “This was really worrying for anyone in that position.”

In its early years as a small enterprise, Twitter was driven by one philosophy: Tweets must flow. This meant that Twitter did little to moderate the conversations on its platform.

Twitter’s founders took their cues from Blogger, the Google-owned publishing platform many helped create. Three employees working at Twitter at the time said they believed any reprehensible content would be greeted or suffocated by other users.

“There’s a certain amount of idealistic enthusiasm you have: ‘If people embrace this as a platform for self-expression, amazing things are going to happen,’ said Jason Goldman, who is on Twitter’s founding team and serves on its board. . “This mission is valuable, but it keeps you from thinking that some of the bad things that happened were errors rather than equal weighted uses of the platform.”

The company would only remove the content if it was spammy or violated American laws prohibiting child abuse and other criminal acts.

In 2008, Twitter hired Del Harvey, its 25th employee and the first person to be appointed to moderate content full-time. The Arab Spring protests began in 2010, and Twitter has become a megaphone for activists, reinforcing many employees’ belief that good speech wins online. But Twitter’s power as a tool of harassment became clear in 2014 when it became the epicenter of Gamergate, a mass-harassment campaign that flooded women in the video game industry with death and rape threats.

“If there are no rules against abuse and harassment, some people risk being bullied and then you don’t benefit from their voices, their perspectives, their free expression,” said Colin Crowell, former head of Twitter. of global public policy leaving the company in 2019

In response, Twitter began expanding its policies. But new threats have emerged. A Russian trawler farm was quietly built in September 2016 2,700 fake Twitter profiles and used them to spark a dispute between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton about the upcoming presidential election.

Profiles went undiscovered for months, harassment complaints continued. In 2017, then-CEO Jack Dorsey announced that policy enforcement would be the company’s top priority. Later that year, women boycotted Twitter during the #MeToo movement, and Mr. Dorsey admitted the company was “still not doing enough”.

The company announced a list of content that it will no longer tolerate: nude images, symbols of hate, and tweets glorifying violence that were shared without the permission of the person making it.

In 2018, Twitter banned several accounts linked to the hack-and-spoof operation that exposed Ms. Clinton’s campaign emails, and began suspending right-wing figures like this. Alex Jones He was removed from his service for repeatedly violating policies.

The following year, Twitter introduced new policies aimed at preventing the spread of misinformation in upcoming elections, and banned tweets that could deter people from voting or mislead them about how to do so. Mr. Dorsey has banned any form of political advertising, but often leaves the difficult moderation decisions to Ms Gadde.

Twitter also developed a strategy that would allow more tweets to follow: instead of removing tweets, it added hashtags containing election misinformation and limited their ability to spread quickly across the platform.

In preparation for the 2020 US presidential election, Twitter banned manipulated videos known as “deepfakes” and prohibited users from sharing material obtained through hacking campaigns.

This policy was tested when The New York Post published an article containing emails allegedly retrieved from the laptop of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, Hunter. Fearing that the materials came from a hack and leak operation, Twitter blocked the article from being shared on its platform.

Mr Dorsey did not publicly agree with the decision. Days later, Ms Gadde announced that the policy had been changed and that Twitter would allow the Post article to appear in tweets.

The episode became key in Twitter’s conservative criticism and echoed in Mr. Musk’s criticism of Ms. Gadde.

Mr Musk said he only wanted to return Twitter to its early days when illegal content was removed. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” Mr Musk tweeted on Tuesday.

Mr. Musk’s plans may also face legal problems in Europe. On Saturday, European politicians reached an agreement. Landmark legislation called the Digital Services ActIt requires social media platforms like Twitter to more aggressively monitor their services for hate speech, misinformation and illegal content.

The new law will require Twitter and other social media companies, with more than 45 million users in the European Union, to conduct annual risk assessments and outline their plans to tackle the problem regarding the spread of harmful content on their platforms. If they’re deemed not doing enough, companies can be fined up to 6 percent of their global revenue or even banned from the European Union for repeat offences.

On Twitter, frustrations grew over Mr Musk’s moderation plans, and some employees wondered if he would actually shut down their jobs at such a critical moment when they’re going to start managing tweets about the election in Brazil and another national election in the United States. States.

Adam Satariano contributing reporting.