Twitter

Zatko had commissioned an external audit of Twitter's capabilities to fight misinformation and it was included in his complaint. The Post obtained the audit and ...

“The folks that they hire are good, and earnest, and really want to make a difference — but Twitter is just an under-resourced company compared to the outsized impact they have on the larger information ecosystem.” He also noted that there’s always tension between those who work in safety and security and those responsible for other aspects of the business. He said Twitter maintains a large office in Japan, which is a huge market for the company, and had employees who consulted on misinformation issues during the election there. Executives felt QAnon didn’t fall under the purview of the disinformation team because the movement wasn’t seeded by a foreign actor, and they determined that the conspiracy wasn’t a child exploitation issue because it included false instances of child trafficking. The Twitter executive who spoke on behalf of the company said the report painted a misleading picture about its response to threats internationally. "It isn’t a sound defense to say we’re really small and we’re not making that much money,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. A senior company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing litigation with billionaire Elon Musk, told The Post that the report — which was based on interviews with just 12 Twitter employees — tended to blow individuals’ concerns out of proportion, including worries about the Birdwatch launch. And it published a first-ever archive of state-back disinformation campaigns on its platform, a move researchers have praised for its transparency. “To successfully moderate content at scale, we believe companies — including Twitter — can’t invest in headcount alone,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said in an interview. It also highlighted a lack of language capabilities so severe that many content moderators resorted to Google Translate to fill the gaps. Yet it underscores a fundamental conundrum for the 16-year-old social media service: in spite of its role hosting the opinions of some the world’s most important political leaders, business executives and journalists, Twitter has been unable to build safeguards commensurate with the platform’s outsized societal influence. The details of Twitter’s near-miss with Birdwatch came to light as part of an explosive whistleblower complaint filed in July by the platform’s former head of security, Peiter Zatko.