Since The Verge reported that Twitter has shut down its communications office has made it harder to confirm information about the company, which seems to be how CEO Elon Musk likes it. However, increasingly, Twitter’s trust and safety chief Ella Irwin seems more willing to confirm or deny the rumors to the media, a move that may irritate Musk. Over the holiday weekend, Musk tweeted to directly contradict a statement Irwin provided to Reuterscausing even more confusion about what’s going on on Twitter and if there’s any tension between Musk and Irwin.
The timeline of conflicting statements went as follows: Friday, December 12. 23, Reuters reported that Twitter had apparently removed the #ThereIsHelp feature from the social media platform, which was designed to share suicide prevention resources with certain content.
Shortly after Reuters’ report went live, Irwin emailed Reuters to confirm that the feature had been “temporarily removed”. She said it would be brought back this week, once Twitter was done “fixing and revamping our prompts.”
“We know they’re useful, and our intention was not to permanently remove them,” Irwin told Reuters.
The next day, at 6:27 a.m. on Christmas Eve, Musk tweeted to contradict Irwin’s statement, claiming that the Reuters report was false and that the feature was never removed. In another tweet shortly after, Musk called the Reuters report “fake news”, while reminding Twitter users that “Twitter does not prevent suicide”.
About 12 hours later, Reuters confirmed that the feature was restored, continuing to contradict Musk’s statement that the feature was never removed. This second report credited “two people familiar with the matter” as saying the #ThereIsHelp feature was down for two days and claiming the takedown order came from Musk.
As of this writing, it’s still unclear which Twitter executive is telling the truth. a tweet The link to the initial Reuters report currently displays a community note concurring with Musk’s statement stating that the report is false, suggesting that enough users rated Musk’s statement above Irwin’s. Musk did not respond to tweets from Legacy Blue Checks and Blue Verified Blue Checks Twitter, asking if he was calling Irwin a “liar” or if he planned to fire Irwin.
Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request for clarification. Perhaps because of the holidays, Irwin has remained silent on Twitter; his last tweet was sent on December 12. 20.
“Ella’s Direction”
According to her LinkedIn Profile, Irwin joined Twitter’s trust and safety team last June, having previously held similar roles at Google, Amazon and Twilio. She rose to the top position of trust and safety after Yoel Roth quit Twitter shortly after Musk took over.
Many Twitter users became familiar with Irwin after his handle appeared in the watermark during Musk’s posting of “The Twitter Files”, indicating that it was she who fed the internal files of the journalists from Twitter.
A few days later, when Twitter has started suspending journaliststhe The Washington Post reported that internally the suspensions were marked as ordered not by Musk, but by “Ella’s management”.
It’s possible that after a few media cycles reviewing Twitter’s security features, Irwin’s interest has increased in setting the record straight, and she’ll likely continue to be scrutinized for any changes to the trust and privacy policy. safe as long as she stays on Twitter. But with the communications department seemingly non-existent — and after Musk’s rush to contradict one of the few official statements a Twitter official has provided to the media since his takeover — it seems unlikely that Irwin will clarify anytime soon whether she made “false” statements about deleting Twitter. .the suicide prevention function.
While Irwin faced backlash from users who championed Musk as a proven truth-teller, Musk was busy introducing another new Twitter feature that became controversial. Dec. On January 22, Twitter added views to other publicly displayed metrics on tweets. These view counts now appear next to likes, comments, and retweets.
Over the next two days, however, many users criticized the new feature. Some have suggested that this goes against research on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and could have a negative impact on the mental health of Twitter users. But maybe millions of others hated this feature just because of how weird the display of views was stuck next to retweets and likes. In Dec. 24, Announced musk that soon Twitter users could disable the feature.
“I think almost everyone will end up loving it,” Musk tweeted, almost like it was his Christmas wish to introduce a universally popular Twitter feature and happily free himself from all the backlash he’s had. been faced since becoming Chief Twit.
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