Doom? Hackers, abusers and regulators may vex Musk at Twitter
Elon Musk's talk of slimming Twitter's staff and letting people post anything allowed by law is expected to clash with the reality of fending off hackers, trolls, police and regulators, experts say.
If Musk guts Twitter staff or mass resignations hit the platform, it could mean "doom," said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University.
"No matter Musk's big vision, you need a highly skilled, knowledgeable workforce capable of (re)building a viable platform and responding to EU obligations," Tromble told AFP.
Along with engineers, that includes legal and policy teams that keep user data safe and guard against dangerous posts.
"There really, truly are almost countless ways that Twitter as a company has to think about safeguarding its users," Tromble said.
Cybersecurity issues range from lone hackers out to cause mischief to organized groups and attacks by nation states.
Then there are "bad actors" who gang up to abuse targets on Twitter in a tactic referred to as "dog piling."
"One of my greatest fears at the moment, is that a sort of large scale firing or even large scale resignations will mean that the already imperfect system will just backslide," Tromble said.
Losing people from teams that fight intrusive demands by police or other government agencies for Twitter user data means experience walks out the door with them, Tromble added.
Musk is in for a wake-up call when it comes to taking a laissez faire approach to content moderation, according to Emma Llanso of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
US law is permissive in terms of letting social media platforms decide content policies and not holding them accountable for what users post, but that could soon
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