Elon Musk is hiring 100 content moderators to combat child porn on X – after culling 1,200 ‘trust and safety specialists’ in his $44B takeover

Elon Musk hires moderators to monitor

Social media company

Musk’s social networking site will create a new ‘Trust and Safety center of Excellence’ in Austin, Texas, where the new moderation team will work.

X was recently exposed by an Australian online safety commissioner, eSafety, for suspending 80 percent of security engineers since Musk took over the company in 2022.

The decision to hire 100 staff for the new safety team comes ahead of a Senate hearing on children’s online protection that will take place on January 31, 2024.

Social media company

The eSafety Commission has obtained a detailed overview of software engineers using Australia’s groundbreaking Online Safety Act. It showed that 1,213 specialist ‘trust and security employees’, including contractors, had left X since Musk’s takeover.

Australian eSafety Commissioner Julia Inman Grant, who previously worked at Twitter, said it was the first time these shocking figures had been revealed.

“Removing eighty percent of these specialist engineers would be like Volvo – known for its safety standards – wiping out all its designers and engineers,” Inman Grant told AFP.

“You have a perfect storm. You are drastically reducing your defenses and you are introducing repeat offenders back onto the platform,” she said.

Australia has led the global push to regulate social media, forcing tech companies to outline how they tackle issues such as hate speech and child sexual abuse.

X has made the decision to hire more content moderators just ahead of a US Senate hearing that is expected to grill CEOs of X and other social media platforms on child safety online

Musk’s social networking site will create a new ‘Trust and Safety center of Excellence’ in Austin, Texas, where the new moderation team will work. The current X headquarters (pictured) is in San Francisco

In October last year, the eSafety Commission fined X Aus$610,500 (US$388,000) for failing to demonstrate how it would crack down on child pornography.

But X ignored the deadline to pay the fine before taking legal action to have the fine overturned.

However, X has now made the decision to hire more content moderators just ahead of a hearing in the US Senate, which is expected to grill CEOs of

In a blog post on Friday, X said it suspended 12.4 million accounts last year for violating rules against child sexual exploitation.

This is a dramatic increase from the 2.3 million account suspensions in 2022.

The new center in Austin will help X combat other types of harmful content, the company said.

Members of the public were quick to call out X for firing the moderators in the first place in light of new hiring plans.

“I think a lot of the people who were fired for not doing something actually did something,” one Reddit user responded to the news.

“So basically… announce this, mention it at the hearings, then never dismiss it again, but keep mentioning how they plan to use it when questioned by the media,” said another.

Musk has previously faced criticism for trying to minimize moderation on the social media site.

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