Thread by @BriannaWu

I’ve never talked about it before - but in the aftermath of Gamergate. I worked extensively with Twitter Trust and Safety to help improve Twitter’s policies.

That’s everything Elon Musk wants to dismantle. Thank you, @kattenbarge for telling my story.

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…

2/ Here are a few of the highlights.

First, it’s a complete misunderstanding to think anything the Twitter Trust and Safety team does is political. We never had one political conversation.

They were trying to solve a USER EXPERIENCE problem. Every tech product has UX people.

3/ We did great work together. One example. Disinformation bots. It took years, but bots on service got drastically better from around 2015-2018.

That didn’t happen serendipitously. It happened by sending Twitter hundreds of examples so they could figure out how to block them.

4/ Twitter often needed academics and industry experts to make a case to sell to the company leadership. I helped connect them on multiple occasions.

Again, NOT POLITICAL. We are talking about expertise so a UX team can make a better product.

5/ Problem is, business interests of Twitter are often directly at odds with the Trust and Safety team at Twitter.

A viral rape threat is great for business. Lots of eyeballs, lots of follows, lots of retweets. The algorithm wants shocking content like that. T&S had to fight.

6/ Something I also want to make clear.

I changed my mind on many policies advocated in feminist circles I believed in, after hearing the Trust and Safety team’s point of view.

Many of the things I thought would help don’t scale, or would lead to other abuse.

7/ The thing I really walked away with is understanding that moderation was a lot harder than I thought.

It involves compromise with competing interests. It involved empathy. And it really involved asking yourself how your decision could make things worse.

8/ Something really changed with my relationship with the Trust and Safety team after Trump was elected.

Before that, it was normal people versus the trolls.

After that, these policies became another stupid politicized right vs left screaming match.

9/ That was when I started to get the sense Trust and Safety was losing more battles than they won.

Please understand, Jack Dorsey said publicly he was getting daily updates on building anti-harassment tools in the Gamergate era. That will seemed to evaporate.

10/ It feels like many of the policies we fought hard for in the Gamergate era, like rules against maliciously outing transgender people, are hanging on by a thread.

When Dorsey left - I had hoped the change of CEO would make things better. It’s clear it will get worse.

11/ More than anything, I wish Twitter leadership would listen to the people at Trust and Safety more and give them more resources.

They are incredible professionals. Data-driven. Thoughtful. Non-political, and they care about this service.

They deserve better leadership.