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Social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, plans to open a new office dedicated to its center of excellence for Trust and Safety. Located in Austin, Texas, it will be home to a team focused on enforcing the app‘s content and safety rules. The Elon Musk-led firm aims to hire 100 full-time employees for this content moderation job.
X to open a new Trust and Safety center, hire 100 content moderators
Twitter has undergone a lot of changes since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022. Not only did Musk rebrand the social network to X, but also laid off thousands of employees to cut operational costs. He downsized the trust and safety team with plans to rely on automated detection of hateful and abusive content. Musk said machines will be integral to content moderation on the platform.
In a recent blog post, X said it sent its first ever fully-automated report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2023. Overall, the firm sent 850,000 reports to NCMEC last year, over eight times more than it did in 2022. X also suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating our CSE policies in 2023, up from 2.3 million accounts in 2022.
Additionally, it has “reduced the number of successful searches for known Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) patterns by over 99% since December 2022.” Based on these numbers, Musk’s reliance on machines for content moderation, particularly child sexual exploitation (CSE) materials, seems effective. However, it appears X is looking to expand its human team of content moderators too.
The new team will focus on fighting child abuse content
In the same blog post, the company announced its plans to build a Trust and Safety Center of Excellence in Austin, Texas, and hire more in-house agents to stop the spread of CSE materials and other types of harmful content. Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, has now shared more details. He didn’t specify when the office will be operational but confirmed that the new team will focus on fighting child abuse content.
“X does not have a line of business focused on children, but it’s important that we make these investments to keep stopping offenders from using our platform for any distribution or engagement with CSE content,” Benarroch said. “The team is currently being built,” he added. The goal is to fill the positions by the end of 2024, though the pace of hiring will depend on finding the right talent.
Interestingly, this announcement comes just a few days before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on January 31 about online child safety. X CEO Linda Yaccarino will testify before the Committee, along with the CEOs of Meta, Snap, TikTok, Discord, and other companies. X says only 1% of its daily users are aged below 17, with a lower age limit of 13. It doesn’t show targeted ads to its teen users.
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