NEW ORLEANS: President Emmanuel Macron on Friday visited New Orleans, a city emblematic of historic Franco-American ties, to promote the French language and conclude his state visit to the United States.

The French president, on the third day of a US trip that included a lavish reception at the White House a night earlier, strolled New Orleans’s historic French Quarter — and held an unannounced face-to-face meeting with Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Macron said the two had a “clear and honest” discussion during an hour-long meeting and that he conveyed to Musk his — and Europe’s — concerns about content moderation on the influential platform.

“Transparent user policies, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech: efforts have to be made by Twitter to comply with European regulations,” Macron tweeted after the meeting.

Macron arrived in the iconic Louisiana city to a colourful welcome by a jazz band on the tarmac at the airport, before walking the French Quarter’s lively streets with his wife, Brigitte.

Content moderation plan

Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favoring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety said.

Twitter is also more aggressively restricting abuse-prone hashtags and search results in areas including child exploitation, regardless of potential impacts on “benign uses” of those terms, said Twitter Vice President of Trust and Safety Product Ella Irwin.

“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” Irwin said, in the first interview a Twitter executive has given since Musk’s acquisition of the social media company in late October.

Her comments come as researchers are reporting a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk announced an amnesty for accounts suspended under the company’s previous leadership that had not broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam.”

Irwin said Musk encouraged the team to worry less about how their actions would affect user growth or revenue, saying safety was the company’s top priority. “He emphasizes that every single day, multiple times a day,” she said.

The company has faced pointed questions about its ability and willingness to moderate harmful and illegal content since Musk slashed half of Twitter’s staff and issued an ultimatum to work long hours that resulted in the loss of hundreds more employees.

And advertisers, Twitter’s main revenue source, have fled the platform over concerns about brand safety.

The approach to safety Irwin described at least in part reflects an acceleration of changes that were already being planned since last year around Twitter’s handling of hateful conduct and other policy violations, according to former employees familiar with that work.

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2022