The European Union disagrees with Twitter owner Elon Musk’s plans to use volunteers and AI to censor content on the platform. According to a report by The Financial Times, EU regulators have told Musk to hire more human censors and fact-checkers.
Musk has been looking for ways to salvage the loss-making business he acquired for $44 billion last October. He terminated over half of Twitter staff and has been looking for cheaper ways to moderate speech.
Like many other social media platforms, Twitter uses a mix of AI and human moderators to police content. However, unlike Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, it does not rely on fact-checkers.
In the place of fact-checkers, Twitter has a volunteer moderators feature called Community Notes.
The EU is concerned that Twitter might not be able to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large platforms to be more proactive in the moderation of content. Twitter and other large platforms are expected to comply with the new censorship law by September 2023.
In meetings with Twitter, EU regulators have acknowledged that Community Notes could flag misleading information, the same way Wikipedia editors achieve the same result.
In a statement, the European Commission said: “We believe that ensuring sufficient staff is necessary for a platform to respond effectively to the challenges of content moderation, which are particularly complex in the field of hate speech. We expect platforms to ensure the appropriate resources to deliver on their commitments.”
