Tensions flare between Musk and Twitter’s Trust & Safety Chief as both try to call out each others’ lies

It seems that Musk would prefer if people aren’t exactly aware of what’s going on inside Twitter, and would much rather have things shrouded in mystery, apart from the “truth” that he presents as he deems fit.

Recently, Elon Musk and his team turned Twitter’s suicide prevention measures. Twitter had disabled the platforms’ #ThereIsHelp feature, which was designed to share suicide-prevention resources alongside certain content.

As per a report by Ars Technica, shortly after the news went live, Irwin emailed Reuters who had broken the news, to confirm that the feature was “temporarily removed.” She said that it would be brought back this week, once Twitter finished “fixing and revamping our prompts.”

However, things took a bizarre turn, when Elon Musk contradicted Irwin’s statement, saying that Reuters’ report on the subject was false and the feature was never removed. In a following tweet, Musk declared Reuters’ report “fake news,” and reminded users that “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”

Soon, Reuters put out another report which stated that the feature was removed, and then restored after the new of its removal broke out. All of this, starting from the removal of the feature to its restoration, was done on Elon Musk’s orders, who wants to rid Twitter of all “useless” features. Reuters’ second report also cited two people who were in the know, who claimed that the takedown and restoration orders came from Musk himself.

This isn’t the first time where Musk has been contradicted by an employee on Twitter. Eric Frohnhoefer, an engineer working with Twitter had called Musk out publicly when he recently complained that the app was slow in a number of countries and that he apologises for it. His main contention was that the app loaded much quicker in some countries, and slower in others.

Instead of talking over the subject in private and sorting things out, the tech mogul and the engineer had a go at each other, after which Musk simply declared that Frohnhoefer had been terminated.

There are many more such instances, where former employees at Twitter were terminated for contradicting Musk.

Irwin who joined Twitter’s trust and safety team last June, rose to the top position in her division when Musk took over and her seniors either left, or were terminated.

When Twitter began suspending journalists over the whole doxxing-Elon-Musk-and-his-jet incident, the Washington Post reported that internally, the suspensions were marked as ordered not by Musk, but by the “direction of Ella.