• X (formerly Twitter) is reportedly planning to hire 100 full-time employees to focus on content moderation for the platform.
• The employees would work out of a new office located in Austin, Texas.
• After firing many of the staff responsible for policing content on X, a Trust and Safety center of excellence is being spun up by Elon Musk.

X (formerly Twitter) is in dire need of content moderators.

The platform is rife with NSFW and exploitative content that sits alongside safe to consume content on the timeline, and it continues to be a growing problem, especially if X aims to court back the advertisers that CEO Elon Musk told to go “f@#k themselves”.

According to a Bloomberg (paywall) report, X, which saw a number of content moderators being fired shortly after Elon Musk completed his purchase of the platform and took over as CEO, is now looking to hire as many as 100 employees as part of its Trust and Safety center of excellence.

The center will be located in new offices in Austin, Texas, head of business operations Joe Benarroch told Bloomberg.

One of its key focus areas will be around child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other exploitative content that’s linked to minors. This is an issue that recently installed X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote about in a blog post earlier this month.

“As an entirely new company, X has strengthened its policies and enforcement to tackle CSE [child sexual exploitation]. We are now taking action on users that distribute this content and also taking immediate action on the networks of users who engage with this horrible content,” she emphasised.

“In 2024, we will continue to share detailed updates about our investment in this area. We are improving our detection mechanisms to find more reportable content on the platform to report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Plus, we are also building a Trust and Safety center of excellence in Austin, Texas, to hire more in-house agents so we can keep accelerating our impact,” she added.

The aforementioned 100 new employees as content moderators look to be part of the larger plan she was referring to.

While actively fighting CSE and CSAM content on X is a step in the right direction, it is far from the only inappropriate, triggering, and illegal posts that appear on the platform. As such, the 100 new hires likely will not be enough to police a platform the size of X.

[Image – Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash]