Twitter began rolling out a controversial new paid subscription system on Saturday that the social network’s unpredictable new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, ordered staff to build after taking over last week.
Days into the Tesla boss’s stewardship of one of the world’s leading platforms for discourse and activism, his promises and provocations are prompting a wave of reactions â?? including warnings from the United Nations and an apology from Twitter’s co-founder.
His plan to dial back content moderation on the site is causing such concern that UN rights chief Volker Turk on Saturday urged him to make respect for human rights central to the social network.
“Twitter has a responsibility to avoid amplifying content that results in harms to people’s rights,” Turk said in his open letter.
Reports of Musk laying off the platform’s entire human rights team were “not, from my perspective, an encouraging start,” he said.
Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 and stepped down as CEO last year, tweeted to apologize for growing the site too quickly a day after roughly half the company’s 7,500 employees were fired by Musk.
“I realize many are angry with me,” he wrote.
The remaining employees are witnessing an upheaval in their company´s culture. As early as last Friday, Musk launched his first flagship project, the redesign of the Twitter Blue subscription option.