Newly announced shopping features on Twitter pose considerable content moderation risks that may lead to "individual and societal harm," a leaked memo addressed to Twitter employees retrieved by The Verge revealed.
The memo was emailed in early July to Twitter employees, a source who knows the content of the email told The Verge. In the email, some existing and not-yet-deployed features of Twitter Shops are described as "high risk," with the memo revealing that content moderation has not been prioritized in the Twitter shopping feature.
How Twitter Shops Work
First introduced in the summer, Twitter Shops lets brands list items for sale and pin a number of products on top of the merchant's profile. Not like similar shopping features on Instagram, users can't make direct product purchases on Twitter. These for sale items instead are linked out to the merchant's website. An expanded version of Twitter Shops allows sellers to showcase up to 50 products in their storefront, and this was available to all U.S.-based merchants in June.
In a section of the leaked memo with the subhead "risk assessment," several elements of shopping feature are described as "high." One high-risk issue is the merchant-generated fields, such as shop names and descriptions, which could be used by malicious actors in damaging ways.
Twitter's shopping module allows anyone with a professional account selling products in the US to freely add products for sale to their profile on their own. When choosing items to appear in the expanded Twitter shop, merchants can also append a custom shop name and descriptions on the Twitter dashboard. It's in these fields that Twitter teams working on the site's shopping feature say are risks.
Significance of Twitter Memo
The memo shows the internal process to look for and remove potentially abusive or harmful content on such Twitter features. The social media destination lacks a policy on what is a recognized shop name or description violation, the memo said, and ldoes nit have any guidance on how these violations should be addressed. The memo also notes that Twitter does not have tools to pinoint violations in shop names and descriptions and that no mechanism exists for users to report storefronts for any violations.
A main selling point of Twitter's shopping features is shareability, and the company has introduced other updates like reminders that allow customers to get notified and tweet about new releases from brands. Currently, Twitter users have the ability to click into merchant shops, view products, and click out to merchant websites, but sharing the storefronts isn't yet possible. The internal memo tags the ability to share storefronts as "high" on its risk assessment, saying that if the feature was available today, it could lead to harmful content being intensified, adding the visibility of prohibited content on Twitter.
Twitter has some automated mechanisms to detect individual products listed for sale the memo emphasized. But proactive measures to pinpoint violations are "limited," and the company has minimal staff and tools for added review.
Twitter spokesperson Lauren Alexander confirmed the authenticity of the memo in a statement to The Verge, noting the memo was part of a new feature assessment effort initiated by Twitter's product trust team. These assessments are made so that different teams can offer their inputs to ensure the safety of new product releases.
Twitter has been trying to broaden revenue sources from mere advertising in recent years, with experimants on paid subscription, live broadcast ticketing on Spaces, and paid Super Follows. Though the platform has been rolling out and expanding its commerce tools, it has trailed behind other platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok. In his attempted takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk said payments can contribute a substantial share of the Twitter's business.
