The online safety regulator has written to Elon Musk, cautioning him his company must comply with Australian law and expressing concern about the cuts to the platform’s safety team and proposed changes to verification.
Julie Inman Grant, who worked for Twitter prior to becoming Australia’s eSafety commissioner in 2016, told a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday she had written to Twitter’s new billionaire owner to seek assurances Twitter would comply with takedown and other government requests.
Australia’s online safety act gives the eSafety commissioner powers to issue requests to companies like Twitter to provide information to her about accounts or remove content such as bullying or image-based abuse targeted at Australians.
Since the takeover, Musk has faced pressure from advertisers to keep Twitter’s moderation policies in place, and despite initially indicating there might be a relaxation, the billionaire has since suggested there would be no immediate changes to policies.
But after Musk sacked up to half of the Twitter workforce last week, it was unclear whether staff who were tasked with enforcing those policies were still employed, including those who dealt with requests from Australia.
“This is a complex operational ecosystem, so we need to know that we have people that we can interface here and who are looking after Australians’ concerns and providing those back to HQ,” Inman Grant said.
“So [I am] asking for clarification that they will be recognising our laws, they will be responding expeditiously to our regulatory requests, whether they’re formal or informal, as we have in the past and clarifying what our escalation paths will be with the company so that we can remediate harm.”
Inman Grant indicated she was particularly concerned about the exodus of staff in the safety team.
“The challenge of culling half of Twitter’s workforce is they had challenges keeping up with the volume before, what are they going to do now?
“Either people are going to have to do two or three people’s jobs or things are going to inevitably fall between the cracks and that I think is a great concern.”
The commissioner also said Musk’s plan to allow people to pay $8 a month for a blue tick on Twitter, which was currently used to verify people with a public profile, would cause problems for the service.
“If you make it a pay for play type of proposition, it turns that whole justification for having such a system on its head, it’s simply paying for a subscription service and not only will not provide those protections, but I think can open the platform up to much more malfeasance, impersonation and fake accounts and possibly with state-sponsored information operations as well,” she said.
“It’s a shame that they culled so many of these employees with trust and safety, knowledge of the policies and tools because I would argue we need more safety reinforcements at Twitter and not less and it makes everyone on the platform vulnerable.”
The commissioner said the company was likely to go through more turmoil in the near future.
“If the first week of the chief Twit’s tenure is any indication, I think they have a bumpy ride ahead of them,” she said.
“It’s said that content moderation is not rocket science, but in some ways, it’s much more complex and nuanced than that.”
Guardian Australia has sought comment from Twitter.
