Twitter.The UN asked Elon Musk to respect human rights

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said he was concerned about Elon Musk's new Twitter management.

• At the end of October Elon Musk took over Twitter and launched a major layoff campaign.
• Twitter divisions such as human rights and artificial intelligence have been deleted.
• The UN has now asked Musk to commit to ensuring that human rights are respected on the social network.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, asked the new ownership to Twitter to put i human rights in the center of the platform.In the past few days Elon Musk officially took over the famous social network and immediately announced the dismissal of approximately half of the employees, including those who worked in human rights departments.A small revolution that has aroused criticism and concern, now reaching the United Nations.

Elon Musk's mass layoffs

After months of negotiations, offers, about-faces and denials, at the end of October the American billionaire Elon Musk he purchased the social network Twitter for an amount of 44 billion dollars. “The little bird has been freed”, was his first comment, referring to the platform's branding.

Musk has long criticized Twitter's content restriction, which has led, among other things, to the removal of profiles like those of Donald Trump.While the old ownership has worked in recent years to stop the circulation of fake news on the social network and limit practices such ashate speech, the founder of Tesla presented himself as a champion of “maximum freedom of expression”, underlining that it will not cause it to be cancelled not even the account that follows his private jet, despite it being “a direct risk to personal safety”.A few hours after the takeover, Twitter then eliminated the division that deals with content moderation And he introduced there blue tick for a fee, another measure that has made most people turn up their noses:that certification, now free, allows you to distinguish verified accounts from fictitious ones and constitutes a sort of quality assurance of information and content.

But Elon Musk's most brutal intervention was in the field of human resources.A few hours after the purchase, Twitter fired all its executives, then announced a layoff plan that affected approximately half of the over 7 thousand employees.Many people would have been left at home overnight and have been activated class action for violation of federal laws Californians at work.Entire divisions have been completely or almost completely dismantled, like that of public relationsAnd, that of human rights and the one who deals with artificial intelligence.

Fear for human rights

Elon Musk's approach to Twitter's freedom of expression, which would seem like a sort of carte blanche to all content without any moderation, is raising many doubts.This also in light of past scandals linked to social networks, such as Cambridge analytics or the complaint to Facebook of the Rohingya.So much so that even L intervened'Un.

An open letter published fromHigh Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, underlines that the cancellation of the rights and artificial intelligence division wanted by Elon Musk is not an encouraging start to management, and urged the new owner "to ensure that human rights are at the heart" of the platform.

Yourk then enunciated some principles that should guide the new ownership of Twitter in the management of the social network.First of all, we need to protect the freedom of expression in the world, communicating directly with governments when this does not happen.Secondly, freedom of expression on Twitter should not be considered a pass, in the sense that it is necessary to stem misinformation.Turk then underlined that there should be no space on the platform for violence, hatred and discrimination.Finally, it is necessary to guarantee maximum transparency and protection of privacy, even for content not in English. In recent days, other positions had also arrived regarding the topic of human rights and Twitter.The White House spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, he had asked that social networks did more to ban hateful content from their platforms.

Meta also fires

Meanwhile too Half, the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, would be preparing a great one layoff plan.The indiscretion came from the Wall Street Journal, according to which in the next few days there will be the largest cut in human resources since the company existed in 2004.

The decision would have to do with the loss of 80 billion dollars of its market value and to stay at home could be the 10 percent of approximately 87 thousand employees.In fact, a few weeks ago an exponent of Meta had said that "we expect to end 2023 with approximately the same size or with a slightly smaller organization than today", underlining that some divisions could have been strengthened, others cancelled.