The European Commissioner for Justice has warned tech chiefs in Dublin about their responsibilities following major job losses at Twitter.
Commissioner Didier Reynders got a "voluntary commitment" from Dublin's Twitter chiefs to improve moderation at a meeting earlier today. The percentage of flagged content being removed from Facebook and Twitter has been in decline in recent years.
The significant cuts to jobs in Twitter are a "concern" to the Justice Commissioner as he fears moderation rates will decline further. Twitter announced they were cutting half of their 7,500 employees while Meta announced 11,000 jobs would be lost.
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Commissioner Reynders is also concerned about data protection of social media users in the face of the job cuts. He said: "Hate speech and hate crime is increasing at an alarming rate in Europe and the US...
"What we have seen in the last weeks [the job cuts] in quite concerning....With the decisions we have seen about the reduction of the staff in a company like Twitter, we want to be sure there is enough resources to organise a real protection for the personal information of the users and then on the functioning of the platform - what kind of moderation is organised."
He added: "For the moment, we have expressed our concern and we have received many commitments". The European Commission has been carrying out reviews of moderation rates since 2016.
The EC released new data today which shows: "This year's results unfortunately show a decrease in companies' notice-and-action results: the number of notifications reviewed by the companies within 24 hours dropped as compared to the last two monitoring exercises, from 90.4% in 2020, to 81% in 2021, and 64.4% in 2022. TikTok is the only company that improved its time of assessment. The removal rate, at 63.6%, is also considerably lower than at its peak in 2020 (71%)."
Moderation and removal of flagged content on social media platforms is essential to curtail hate speech online. The report added: "On average, 69.6% of content calling for murder or violence against specific groups was removed, while content using defamatory words or pictures to name certain groups was removed in 59.3% of the cases; showing a better response rate on the most serious manifestations of online hatred."
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