Fired Transgender Twitter Employee Speaks Out About Content Moderation
At Twitter, Melissa Ingle worked on civic integrity and political misinformation as a senior data scientist. Before the U.S.
and Brazil elections, she wrote algorithms to moderate harmful content on Twitter. She was one of the 4,400 contract staff who was denied access to Twitter's internal systems last month because of Elon Musk's takeover of the social media platform and then fired.She tells The Advocate that her job involved a lot of data analysis. "I would help to write the machine learning algorithms and monitor any kind of report on these algorithms that that scroll through Twitter for tweets that violated our terms of service specifically as it involves political misinformation in the [target] country," Ingle says."We monitored Brazilian elections, Japanese elections, the E.U., the U.K., Argentina, Mexico," she says. "Anywhere we had a substantial presence."She says many teams interfaced with each other and collaborated to understand each location's needs."We worked cross-functionally with many different teams to help us understand the laws and the policies and also to help us with the human review process," she says.She explains that content moderation teams dealt with many types of misinformation and hate speech and that the department reflected the health of Twitter."So we're the health of Twitter.
