Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On November 29, Elon Musk, Twitter's new boss and CEO, declared that protecting children's safety on the platform was a top priority. But after a wave of layoffs and resignations, the key team responsible for censoring child sexual abuse content (CSAM) on Twitter has only one regular employee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

It is not clear how many people there were on the team before Musk took over. On the professional social networking site LinkedIn, Wired magazine identified four Singaporean employees who specialize in child safety. But they said publicly that they had left in November.

The researchers say the importance of in-house child safety experts should not be underestimated. The team is headquartered in Singapore and enforces Twitter's CSAM ban in the Asia-Pacific region. Currently, there is only one full-time employee left on the team. The Asia-Pacific region has a population of about 4.3 billion, accounting for about 60 per cent of the world's population.

The Singapore team is responsible for several of Twitter's busier markets, including Japan. Twitter has 59 million users in Japan, second only to the United States, according to data aggregator Statista. However, after Mr Musk took over the company, the Singapore office was also affected by widespread layoffs and resignations. Over the past month, Twitter has fired more than half of its employees and emailed the rest, asking them to either promise to work "high-intensity, long hours" or accept three months' salary as severance pay.

Carolina Christofoletti, a CSAM researcher at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, said the impact of layoffs and resignations on Twitter's ability to solve CSAM problems was "very worrying". "if people who work on child safety within Twitter are fired or resign on a large scale, then it is absolutely wrong to think that Twitter will not be affected," she said. "

Twitter's child safety experts don't just censor CSAM content on the platform. They have also been helped by organizations such as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and the National Centre for missing and exploited Children (NCMEC), which search the Internet to identify CSAM content shared on platforms such as Twitter. IWF says the data it sends to technology companies can be automatically deleted by the company's system without human intervention. "this ensures that the blocking process is as efficient as possible," said Emma Hardy, director of communications at IWF.

But Kristofletti says these external organizations usually focus only on the final product and do not have access to Twitter's internal data. She calls Twitter's internal data the key to analyzing metadata, helping people who write detection code to detect CSAM content before it is shared. "the only people who can see the metadata are people inside the platform," she said. "

By mutual agreement, Twitter allows people to share adult content, complicating the company's efforts to crack down on CSAM. Alda Arda Gerkens, director of the Dutch foundation EOKM, said that the tools used by the platform to scan child abuse content are difficult to distinguish between voluntary adults and involuntary children. "the technology is not good enough, which is why human resources are so important," she said. "

Before Musk took over, Twitter tried to stop the spread of CSAM content on its website. In its latest transparency report, covering the period from July to December 2021, Twitter said it had blocked more than 500,000 CSAM accounts, an increase of 31 per cent over the previous six months.

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