Elon Musk’s X to rent 100-member staff to reasonable content material associated to baby abuse

Elon Musk’s X, the corporate previously referred to as Twitter, is planning to construct a brand new “Trust and Safety center of excellence” in Austin, Texas, to assist implement its content material and security guidelines.

The firm goals to rent 100 full-time content material moderators on the new location, in keeping with Joe Benarroch, head of enterprise operations at X. The group will concentrate on preventing materials associated to baby sexual exploitation, however will assist implement the social media platform’s different guidelines, which embrace restrictions on hate speech and violent posts, he added. The firm didn’t specify when this new heart can be operational.

“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 mentioned. People should be at the very least 13-years-old to open an account on X, and the corporate says lower than 1% of its day by day customers are between the ages of 13-17. Those 17 and underneath can’t be focused by advertisers.

Musk has been criticized for chopping again on X’s belief and security operations since taking the helm of the corporate in October 2022. He has additionally rescinded some insurance policies, together with these round misinformation, in an effort to carry “free speech” again to the service.

The timing of X’s announcement comes only a few days earlier than Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino is scheduled to seem earlier than the Senate Judiciary Committee for a listening to on baby security on-line. She’ll be joined by the CEOs of different main expertise corporations, together with Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., TikTok, and Discord.

Yaccarino was in Washington this previous week talking with senators from each side of the aisle forward of the upcoming listening to. Conversations centered on X’s efforts with CSE and different varieties of problematic content material, however she additionally tried to focus on the ways in which X is working to tell apart itself from Twitter and the corporate’s prior insurance policies and management, Benarroch added.