Twitter’s top officer in charge of overseeing safety and content moderation quit on Thursday, marking the second time an executive in that position has left since Elon Musk bought the social-media business in October.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, declined to comment on the reason for her resignation. She claimed she had always been truthful in her work. Irwin, who joined Twitter around a year ago, had publicly defended the company’s actions since Musk took over, as she negotiated a high-profile and frequently scrutinized post handling content-moderation choices.
Musk also stated on Thursday that Twitter employees made a mistake in how they handled the publication of a documentary. According to promotional materials for “What Is a Woman?,” the documentary calls into question the logic of a gender-ideology movement that targets women and children. In a series of tweets, Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO of the media firm The Daily Wire, claimed that Twitter tried to suppress the film by claiming that the content broke Twitter’s policy against misgendering.
“This was a mistake made by many people at Twitter,” Musk responded to Boreing’s criticisms on Twitter. “Whether or not you agree with using someone’s preferred pronouns, failing to do so is at best impolite and certainly does not violate any laws.” He also stated that he utilizes someone’s preferred pronouns.
Musk’s statement was notable because Twitter’s regulations ban targeted misgendering of transgender people since years. Twitter recently eliminated a term from its policy that expressly included misgendering, which raised worries among LGBT advocates.
Irwin told The Journal in an email in April that Twitter will “still enforce targeted misgendering and deadnaming.” The practice of using the birth names of transgender people who have changed their names is known as deadnaming. In an April tweet, she wrote, “To be clear, literally no one at Twitter has said we will stop protecting trans users from abuse and harassment.”
Later that day, Musk wrote that people who follow The Daily Wire on Twitter will see the movie in their feed, but the content will not be recommended to people who don’t follow the media outlet and will not be accompanied by advertising.
She had previously defended Twitter’s new owner. In a December interview with the Journal, she said Musk ordered her staff to prioritize safety over any negative consequences such as lower user numbers.
Twitter did not react to a comment request.
Irwin has publicly supported its content-moderation activities on Twitter for several months. “We have been working hard to develop a balanced approach to free speech and keeping people safe from ongoing, repeated harassment,” she said in an April tweet.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s previous head of trust and safety, left the business in November, and Irwin was promoted to the top post supervising user content and safety regulations.
Roth has talked publicly about his disagreements with Musk. Roth claimed at a conference in late November that he quit Twitter because he realized his position wasn’t necessary if the new Twitter leadership wasn’t going to heed to his team’s advice. Roth, for example, said that Musk ignored his team’s warnings about potential problems with Twitter Blue’s launch. The subscription service’s launch was momentarily halted as some subscribers used their blue check marks to impersonate celebrities and brands, causing confusion on the platform. Previously, Twitter did not charge for check marks, which were used to validate accounts that the firm judged real and notable.
Some social-media scholars and campaigners have criticized Musk’s content-moderation method, which he views as favoring free expression. Three members of Twitter’s former Trust and Safety Council, an advisory committee, openly resigned in December, claiming that the safety and well-being of Twitter users was jeopardized. The council was later disbanded by Twitter.
Some opponents have also targeted Musk for allowing many suspended accounts to return to the network, a policy that Irwin has also publicly discussed. In January, she posted that Twitter’s safety team had restored hundreds of accounts and was trying to restore more.
Irwin spent more than two years as Twilio’s vice president of product, concentrating on customer trust, before joining Twitter in 2022. Prior to that, she spent four years as an Amazon director dealing with marketplace abuse.
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