Who is low income? And so Ella is the head of trust and
safety at Twitter, so she's essentially in charge of a lot of the teams that
work on, you know, keeping Twitter safe. Right.
They used to fight misinformation. They used to take down hate speech.
You know, this is the same group that, for example, was responsible for
suspending President Donald Trump a few years ago.
Right. And so this is a pretty high profile
job. A lot of these decisions we've seen be
very controversial over the years. So the person who kind of runs trust and
safety at Twitter has always been a high profile role in that regard because the
decisions that are made are so important to free speech on the Internet.
Right. And so she stepped into a very senior
position under Ellen in just the last couple of months.
But that was what I found so interesting about this.
You and I have done a lot of reporting together over recent months and more
than recent months, honestly. And that was a name I didn't recognize.
You know, we don't commented on a day by day basis that people leaving Twitter,
those that chose to stay. So now my question is, what is it that
she's doing? What is the crux of your big story that
you've learned about her role within the building?
Yeah. Well, you probably aren't familiar with
her name because she really just joined Twitter over the summer, just a few
months before Elan Musk took over. Right.
So she was not necessarily a senior leader in the way that a lot of
employees were, someone who a lot of employees were familiar with by the time
that the deal closed. Right.
But what we, you know, pointed out in our big take and why I think this is an
interesting story is that, you know, they're kind of backing a lot of the
trends of sort of trust and safety over at Twitter these days.
Right. I mean, this is a this is an
organization that exists at Facebook and YouTube and all the other social
players. And, you know, the last couple of years
we've seen these groups get really refined.
Right. They have tons of policies.
They've tons of procedures on. There's there's kind of a standard way
of doing some of this stuff. Right.
And under Elan, a lot of that has gotten thrown out the window.
And so we've seen, you know, for example, there just got rid of their
Covid misinformation. Policy is one example.
You may remember, Ed, a few weeks ago, they just started suspending journalists
sort of without a great explanation. Right.
And so what we've seen is just kind of like this playbook that I think a lot of
folks are familiar with get tossed out. And that's why we find it interesting.
Well, give us some some sort of granularity around the decisions or
actions that she is carrying out, I suppose, on a little muscle behalf.
Yeah, well, typically these types of things would go through a strict
process, right? You know, they might go through multiple
teams, multiple layers, certainly multiple levels of review.
And what we've seen and what we mentioned in our story was that, you
know, we've seen screenshots of things like, hey, we want this account
suspended on the order of Elan or you want this suspended on the order of
Ella. Right.
And these are just, again, not the way that usually these checks and balances
tend to work. And so there's a lot of people in the
world of trust and safety who are worried that there's simply just too
much power being held by one or two people here in this instance.
And that, you know, if they're not following a lot of these checks and
balances that we're used to, you know, you don't know exactly where that's
going to end up. Right.
And again, these journalists being sort of suspended out of the blue is just one
example. But you can imagine that being
extrapolated to a bunch of different account
ISE or indeed remaining how people talked about that and the way in which
she's navigates a temporary arrangement. Well, I mean, I think the issue is not
at all that ELAs is incompetence or anything like that.
I mean, he's had a bunch of really strong roles at tech companies before.
She's described just as an incredible operator, someone who is very organized,
very passionate. It was very emotional about the things
that she cares about, but I don't think she had much experience doing, you know,
speech policy. Right.
Like a lot of times, wealthy would trust and safety their their academics or
their lawyers or the people who have maybe spent their whole life thinking
about things like Section 230. That does not that is not Ella's
background. Right.
And so I think there is a little bit of concern, again, from people who were
within Twitter's trust and safety. But even just like the broader industry
that, you know, she is now in a role that requires that type of nuance.
And, you know, it's something that you build over time.
And I'm just not sure that she's been in that role long enough, especially with
Elan and how he operates, that it's instilling a lot of confidence in people
right now.