Elon Musk announces content moderation board for Twitter

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, announced Friday that he will form a “content moderation council“to evaluate and moderate corporate policies and decisions.

In his latest tweet, Musk informed that the “board” will be composed of “very diverse points of view” and that “no major content or account reinstatement decisions will be made until this board meets.“

Earlier in the day, Elon Musk made it clear why he was upset about the acquisition of the world’s fastest-growing micro-blogging platform. One of them was to make the platform the home of the “freedom of speech“, to remove shadowbanning and was open to allowing former President Donald Trump back on the platform. With Friday’s announcement, it’s clear that he’s ceding those kinds of decisions to the board.

Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

Vague details on the board

Elon Musk hasn’t given many details about the board – whether it will be elected by a vote, how many people will make it up, or even how it will differ from other contemporary boards that already exist at other companies. We’ll have to see what Elon Musk has to say about it, and how democratic his stance on the creation of the council remains.

However, Musk has made it clear that he disagrees with the platform’s current modus operandi; when he took control of the company, he fired several general managers, including policy chief Vijaya Gadde, whose decisions had been publicly ridiculed with vehemence.

It’s not something new, but it’s promising

Other social networking giants, like Meta, have done the same thing with their oversight board, which was designed as an independent organization to monitor Facebook’s platform and moderation decisions. However, critics have raised questions about how much power the board has in its hands and how much it can be enforced. There is also legislation that could dictate and set rules on how technology companies can operate their platforms, which could limit the type of moderation decisions Twitter and other platforms can make.