Tonight on Panorama -
one of the world's most influential social media sites in chaos.
I try to log in, and my email is just not working any more.
Ancl that's when I knew that I had been laid off.
Mr Elon Musk...
For the first time, Twitter insiders tell the story
of Elon Musk's takeover.
You didn't know who you reported to or who was in the company any more.
How he sacked staff who helped keep children safe from paedophiles.
You can't go from a team of 20 to a team of about six or seven
and be able to keep on top of the problem.
And how he welcomed back banned accounts.
Bang out the machete, boom in her face,
and then grip her up by the neck, "Shut up, bitch."
Leaving users feeling unprotected.
I would ask, why are these accounts that are bullying
and harassing people still allowed on the platform?
I'm the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent.
Some of Twitter's 350 million users
have been getting in touch with me about a rise in hate and abuse.
I'm Dr Viki Male, and I'm a senior lecturer in reproductive immunology.
There used to be a mechanism for reporting misinformation.
My name is Helen, and I'm a survivor of domestic abuse.
I have experienced and seen first hand how significantly worse
the online abuse has been on Twitter.
I'm Ellie Wilson.
I'm a rape survivor who's been using social media
to try and campaign to end violence against women.
In the early hours of New Year's Day 2018,
I was raped while unconscious by someone I trusted.
This was the beginning of a cycle of abuse that lasted years.
Ellie tweeted in January this year after the man
who raped her was sentenced to five years in jail.
She received a barrage of abuse.
I find it most difficult,
the people that say that I wasn't raped
or that this didn't happen and that I'm lying.
But also it's sort of like a secondary trauma.
Have the messages been overtly misogynistic?
Yes. There are some messages that, you know, are directly about me
but there are also messages about women in general.
You know, women lie, women are manipulative,
women bring this upon themselves.
There are dozens of accounts using Twitter to abuse Ellie
and other rape survivors.
This one, for example, which appears to have several
accounts in the same name, doing the same thing.
That account I know has targeted my friends as well.
Misogynistic.
Blaming them for being raped.
That sort of thing.
I noticed a lot of the accounts have become far more active
in the last few months.
So what's changed?
I'm off to San Francisco, to where Twitter was founded, to find out.
I'm going to meet the insiders
who signed up to Twitter's founding mission -
to give everyone the power to share ideas and information.
Lovely to meet you.
Thank you so much for having us.
The mission, right, to serve the public conversation,
we all really took that very seriously.
Ancl not only the public conversation,
but really working hard to elevate voices
that had previously struggled to affect that conversation.
Lisa Jennings Young joined the company in 2019
as it was rapidly expanding.
But with Twitter's growth had also come problems.
We had noticed over the past few years individuals
were tweeting less and less.
And that's because, you know, of fear of abuse and harassment.
Lisa's team worked on features
designed to protect users from online hate.
We didn't always get it right, you know,
and we very publicly didn't get it right sometimes.
It was not at all perfect.
But we were trying, and we were making things better,
you know, all the time.
Twitter had developed a set of rules designed to safeguard users.
Helen Sage Lee joined the platform in 2021.
A lot of the policies that are written for social media companies
and for different social media platforms
are put into words that very distinctly outline harm.
Employees who are really just enforcing policy,
or trying to better understand how to enforce policy in a way
that is fair to everybody else, it can be challenging.
Two years ago, Twitter suspended one of its best known
and most active users - US President Donald Trump.
There are some suspensions which you can appeal for
and get that suspension removed.
Ancl then there are some suspensions that are permanent,
and those are the ones that cause more harm to the general public.
After Trump supporters stormed the Capitol,
he was permanently banned.
Twitter said he was inciting violence.
But his removal triggered a debate about freedom of speech.
It struck a chord with another high-profile tweeter - Elon Musk.
"Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy," he tweeted.
"Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?"
A month later, in April 2022, Musk launched a takeover bid.
Six, five, four, three, two, one...
Elon Musk is the second richest man in the world.
His SpaceX rockets and Tesla electric cars
have made him a global figure.
Sources tell the Associated Press Elon Musk has taken over Twitter.
The Twitter takeover appears to be complete,
with Elon Musk at the helm.
Musk is expected to address Twitter employees...
Musk bought the platform outright for $44 billion dollars.
"The bird is freed," he tweeted.
A new Twitter era had begun.
I'm looking for something as broadly inclusive as possible,
that's as trusted as possible as a system,
and I hope we're successful in that regard.
I'm off to meet a member of Twitter's trust and safety council.
Created in 2016, the volunteer group's job
was to advise the company on user safety.
We weren't sure if this brilliant man who launched satellites and
made cars would be able to handle
this very, very different animal called a social media platform.
It's a long learning process to figure out how to keep users safe,
to keep conversations civil, to make platforms work for everybody.
It's really, really complicated.
Did you get to meet Elon Musk or hear from him on a call at all?
We...
There was radio silence.
We never heard from Elon Musk.
I wanted to find out
how Musk's vision was playing out on the inside.
A senior engineer, responsible for the computer code
that powers Twitter, agreed to meet me.
Because he still works there, he's asked us to conceal his identity,
so we're calling him Sam.
Sam says Elon Musk's relaxed public persona
wasn't replicated inside Twitter HQ.
Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards,
very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards
that follow him around.
Even when he goes to the restroom.
I've been working in Silicon Valley for such a long time.
I've seen people with the same level of status, wealth, whatever -
they don't have any security.
They are comfortable with people who are around them.
Musk was certainly comfortable
with his then 118 million Twitter followers,
repeatedly asking their views on how he should run Twitter.
"Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts,"
he asked, "provided that they have not broken the law
or engaged in egregious spam?"
72% said yes.
"The people have spoken," Musk tweeted.
"Amnesty begins next week."
Bang out the machete, boom in her face,
grab her by the neck, "Shut up, bitch!"
Andrew Tate is back on Twitter!
Andrew Tate - a former kick boxer turned social media personality
made a high-profile return to the site.
A sheikh sent us a cake.
He'd been permanently banned in 2017,
after tweets that included saying women who've been raped
should bear some responsibility for being assaulted.
It wasn't just the misogynists who were back -
conspiracy theorists and other extremists
were also allowed to return.
Twitter users have been in touch with me about this, too.
These white supremacists have proliferated,
their hate has burgeoned.
I've been receiving a brutal barrage of trolls online.
It's awash with fake news, it just is.
As Musk was inviting controversial users back on to Twitter,
he was thinking of getting rid of many of his 7,500 staff.
He brought in maybe 20, 30 Tesla engineers to review the code,
and based on that decided on the performance of something
like more than 3,000 engineers.
Sackings followed - many in teams working to keep the platform safe.
Well, that leaves room for much more risk,
more possibilities of things that can go wrong.
Inside Twitter, confusion was spreading.
Senior employees were struggling to understand who was in charge.
One of the first things that happened when the acquisition
finished was that the corporate staff directory was shut down.
So you didn't know who you reported to
or who was in the company any more.
Mostly, it was like messaging people to see if they were still there.
Ancl if you got silence, you assumed they weren't.
So it was a kind of a mystery, a kind of a chaotic kind of...
Like a puzzle.
A puzzle, like, how do we reassemble the company from who's left
after we figure out who's left?
The Twitter employees I met in San Francisco
all recognised that Twitter had never been perfect.
But it had been trying to make the platform safer for users.
One feature Lisa Jennings Young and her team had designed
used software to scan tweets and then nudge users,
asking if they were sure they wanted to post.
We're asking tweeters to review replies
with potentially harmful or offensive language.
Want to take another look before tweeting?
Lisa says Twitter's own research suggests the harmful reply nudge
feature had a significant effect on users' behaviour.
So overall, 60% of users deleted or edited their reply
when given a chance via the nudge, which is huge, huge, huge.
But what was more interesting is that after we nudged people once,
they composed 11 % fewer harmful replies in the future.
I've reported many times
on the damage hate-filled content on Twitter can cause.
I've been bombarded with it myself.
Julie Posetti from the International Center for journalists
has been analysing the messages directed at me.
We can see in April 2021 a massive spike in abuse against you,
which was connected to your reporting
on Covid-19 disinformation.
Then we see in January 2022,
a real reduction in the abuse that you're experiencing,
and that period, of course, coincides with the impact
of some of the anti-abuse measures,
some of the safety measures
that Twitter's teams have been implementing.
I also remember at that time actually really noticing
that it felt like I was receiving less abuse.
Yes.
Working with Sheffield University, Julie's team looked at three periods
- the first in early 2021, the second in 2022,
and the third after Elon Musk took over.
We can directly compare the second period with the third period.
We're looking at the same time frame a year later,
and so here we can see in 2023 that you were starting to experience
an escalation in the obvious abuse that is being detected.
In fact, specifically after Elon Musk took over,
the online violence directed at you picked up by our tools
has more than tripled.
In mid-November last year,
Musk issued his remaining staff with an ultimatum via email.
The subject line read, "A fork in the road."
"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0
and succeed in an increasingly competitive world,
you will need to be extremely hardcore."
"This will mean working long hours at high intensity."
"If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter,
please click yes on the link below."
The link only had the option to click yes.
Ray Serra to decided not to click yes and no longer works at Twitter.
He and his team of 24 had been working to prevent state-sponsored
attempts to undermine democracy or influence elections.
And how frequently were you identifying these kinds
of suspicious activities?
Daily.
I don't think it's exaggeration to say that that team
did that work daily.
Does that team still exist at Twitter?
It exists in a minimised capacity.
There are a number of key experts that are no longer in that team that
would have covered special regions or threat actors
from Russia to China.
Influence operations are not going to stop.
In fact, one can reasonably suspect that they will increase,
given that's public knowledge that the team has been decimated.
Helen Sage Lee also worked to protect elections.
She found out she'd been let go while working late one night.
I remember it was around 9:15.
I refreshed my email in box just to see if anything else had come up.
I try to log in, and my email is just not working any more.
Ancl I had just lost complete access, and that's when I knew that
I had been laid off.
Helen-Sage and others are now suing Twitter over severance pay.
She'd lost her job at a crucial time when elections
were due across the US.
Together with her team, she'd been identifying
fake accounts suspected of spreading misinformation.
I was thinking, what would happen to the job that
I was currently tasked with doing?
Did the rest of my team also get laid off?
Ancl some of these are projects that were meant to help the user
and to really ensure the safety of the user.
So you naturally ask the question, what will happen
to all those projects?
The company was shedding expertise assembled to stop
Twitter being misused.
Musk's vision was for Twitter to be protected by Al more than people.
There was a lot of emphasis on writing code.
Ancl that isn't everything we do.
We have to keep things running as well as write code.
If you keep reducing the people, or the people who support the tools
who support the people, then at some point things
will just break and nobody will know how to fix it.
Are your team who worked on that harmful reply nudge,
are they still at Twitter?
No.
The entire content design team was laid off except for me.
So I was the one person remaining after that.
Soon after her team was sacked, Lisa resigned.
And what does that mean for something like the nudge?
Is it still happening?
Is there anyone working on it?
No.
There's no one there to work on that at this time.
We decided to do a little experiment using a private profile to see
if the harmful reply nudge still worked.
All Twitter employees are lazy losers, BLEEP off and die.
And should this be automatically picked up?
It should yeah, yeah.
Oh, good!
It came up!
I'm so glad it's still working.
Most Tweeters don't post replies like this.
Then Lisa suggested another tweet that she would've
expected to trigger a nudge.
Twitter employees are lazy losers, jump off
the Golden Gate Bridge and die.
OK.
No nudge.
Interesting.
Would you have expect the harmful reply nudge to appear
for messages like that, calling for someone
to die, for example?
I would have.
That would've been my expectation.
Of course, I don't know if anything's changed, but that
would have been my expectation, it would have caught that.
I asked engineer Sam, who's still working at Twitter,
if he knew what'd happened to the harmful reply nudge.
The feature is out there, but there are so many things broken
and there's nobody taking care of it, so you see this, like,
inconsistent behaviour.
For someone on the inside, it's like a building
where all the pieces are on fire.
When you look at it from the outside, the facade looks fine.
But I can see that nothing is working.
It's not only abusive messages and disinformation.
Paedophiles use Twitter to groom children and post images of abuse.
This former employee, who we're calling Rory,
used to work in a team tasked with preventing child sexual
exploitation and reporting offenders to the police.
We're talking of actual contact abuse or, you know,
people sharing the worst of the worst material.
How prevalent was that kind of material on Twitter?
How much of a problem was it?
Oh, it was phenomenally prevalent.
Every clay you would be able to identify that sort of material.
Elon Musk has said he's committed to tackling this kind of content.
Removing child exploitation is priority #1.
Please reply in comments if you see anything that
Twitter needs to address.
But after the takeover, Rory says his team was drastically cut.
You can't go from a team of 20 to a team of about six or seven
and be able to keep on top of the child sexual exploitation
problem on the platform.
Did Musk ever speak directly to you and your team?
No.
Did you receive any communications from him?
No.
From the management?
No.
Why do you think that is?
Who knows?
But you can't take over a company and suddenly believe
you have the knowledge of being able to deal with child sexual
exploitation without having the experts in place.
Twitter says it removed 400,000 accounts in one month alone to help
"make Twitter safer".
But Rory's worried that some users are no longer
being reported to the police.
You can by all means suspend hundreds of thousands
of accounts in a month.
Most of the users who had their accounts suspended would just
set up a new account anyway, so it wasn't unusual
to see people saying, "this is my fifth, sixth,
seventh plus account".
They will be aware of what's going on, so they'll
be having a field clay.
By mid-December last year, having let go of about half of his staff,
Musk then suggested he might go too.
He put his fate in the hands of his Twitter followers.
"Should I step down as head of Twitter?"
He wrote.
"I will abide by the results of this poll."
17.5 million users voted, and 57% said yes.
But today, Musk is still in charge.
We want to do an interview with Elon Musk, and we reached out
to him through his other companies and also through his
Facebook page weeks ago.
Since then we've also been in touch with the Twitter press office,
and we've also tweeted him, but we haven't heard anything back.
So we've decided we're going to take a leaf out of his book and see
what Twitter users want.
"Should Elon Musk do an interview with Marianna Spring
for BBC Panorama?"
This Twitter vote is of course totally unscientific,
and Elon Musk can ignore it if he wants.
But I thought it might be a way of getting his attention.
The results are due in 24 hours.
In the four months since the Elon Musk takeover,
the accounts he's reinstated on Twitter have been thriving.
Although Andrew Tate is currently in custody in Romania on suspicion
of rape and human trafficking, that hasn't harmed his Twitter
profile - he has more than five million followers.
For rape survivor Ellie, allowing the likes of Andrew Tate
back has had a real impact.
I've had a look through some of the accounts that
have targeted me, and, you know, you can see their likes
and so on and so forth, and there have definitely been
people that are supportive of Andrew Tate.
I know that he has this sort of army of fans that
want to defend him every second, and I think these people probably
spend a lot of time online looking at women that criticise him or women
that, you know, are just trying to speak out
against misogyny in general.
New research shared with Panorama shows there's been
a spike in the appetite for harmful material.
We were able to establish the account creation dates
of the seven million followers of known abusive and
harassing accounts online.
We saw huge spikes of account creation around several notable
events during Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, but also related
to the known online misogynistic influence of Andrew Tate.
When comparing the period before Musk's takeover and after,
we see a 69% increase in the overall level of account creation of those
following known abusive misogynistic accounts.
Dr Posetti believes Musk's amnesty on previously banned accounts has
helped fuel the uptick in abusive tweets directed at me.
This emboldenment occurs when the person who now owns
the platform signals, "It's OK mate, say what you like,
we're more tolerant of that kind of thing now",
which is what we've heard.
That's an entreaty to do and say what you want, you know,
and to do so with impunity.
The amnesty on banned accounts was the final straw for members
of the Trust and Safety Council.
Anne and two of her colleagues resigned.
There's a major impact on reinstating people who engage
in misogyny and hate speech and, you know, anti-gay speech and,
you know, bigotry and all of these sort of categories of hate that
we're now exposed to on Twitter.
A week later, Musk decided he no longer needed the Trust
and Safety Council.
Its 80 or so members were told in an email their advice
was no longer wanted.
I still hadn't heard anything back from Elon Musk.
And my online vote was about to close.
The results are in, and it's a yes.
Over 40,000 Twitter users voted, and 89% of them said
they would like Elon Musk to do an interview with me.
Despite my efforts to get in touch, Elon Musk didn't respond to any
of the points raised in the program me.
However, he tweeted about the program me saying,
"Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise
into place that has...trolls."
The takeover of the platform has been a huge media event,
and there's been a circus that has surrounded it.
I think this has meant that sensible conversations around striking
balances online between safety and expression, about
what the appropriate mandate of moderation is and what the role
of platforms is in dictating a civic discourse has been lost
amid the sort of celebrification of the platform.
For millions around the world, Twitter is part of their
national conversation.
Why is Twitter important?
Well, it's kind of unique in the world at this point.
It has been described as a common space, the world's public forum.
There's not really anything that quite replaces it.
What happens on the platform matters.
We really need to see Twitter invest in these teams instead
of turning their back on their responsibility to children.
It's an absolute dumpster fire of misinformation.
It makes victims feel horrific - stalking, harassment, trolling.
Twitter says "defending and respecting the user's voice"
remains one of its "core values".
After Musk took over, some predicted many users
would defect to other social media platforms.
Some have, but the majority remain.
Elon Musk's Twitter storm still rages.
Those in the eye of that storm are the users.
What would you say to Elon Musk if you had the opportunity?
I would ask, why are these accounts that are bullying and harassing
people still allowed on the platform?
I would like him to read some of the messages that I've been sent
and tell me why those accounts are still allowed to be on Twitter.