X hiring content material moderators for a brand new ‘Belief and Security’ middle in Austin Categorical Occasions

X, previously identified at Twitter, is constructing its content material moderation workforce again up, however not fully.

In keeping with Bloomberg, the corporate is hiring 100 staff for a “Belief and Security middle of excellence” in Austin, TX. After Elon Musk took over the platform in 2022, he laid off round 80 % of the corporate and gutted the content material moderation workforce. The brand new workforce will concentrate on imposing the platform’s guidelines round violence and hate speech, and particularly combatting CSE (Little one Sexual Exploitation).

The timing of this report comes days earlier than X CEO Linda Yaccarino is scheduled to testify earlier than the Senate Judiciary Committee for a listening to on defending youngsters on-line. On Friday, Jan. 26, X printed a blog post outlining its work to “sort out Little one Sexual Exploitation” on the platform.

As a self-professed “free-speech absolutist,” Musk purchased the platform to create a digital city sq. by rolling again insurance policies and efforts which he believed hindered free speech. Nevertheless, this quickly turned X into an much more poisonous place, which precipitated massive ticket advertisers to depart the platform and X’s valuation to plummet.

Is the event of a content material moderation headquarters the signal of optimistic change for the platform? In keeping with 2020 NYU Stern report, Twitter used to have round 1,500 content material moderators, so a workforce of 100 is peanuts in comparison with what it was once. Little question, Yaccarino may have extra to say about it on the listening to on Jan. 31.