According to a recent report by Bloomberg, Project Guardian covers a list of thousands of high-profile accounts that include politicians, musicians, journalists, professional athletes, and more. Twitter prioritizes flags about abuse reported on these accounts and reviews them before other flagged reports in the content moderation queue. Twitter’s content moderation is done with the help of any user that can report Tweets or comments they consider to violate the platform’s policies. Twitter also relies on machine learning to flag content and a dedicated team of content moderators that determine the fate of a Tweet based on the platform’s policies. Bloomberg noted that the accounts that are a part of Project Guardian do not have any special rules but that the program is instead set in place to spot and stop “viral nightmares” before they happen. In addition, most users who are a part of Project Guardian don’t even know they are given special attention. The list of VIP users is reportedly constantly changing, depending on who is targeted on Twitter that day, week, or month. Accounts are added by a Twitter employee recommending them, a user’s manager or agent approaching Twitter to ask for help, or social media managers at news organizations reaching out on behalf of their colleagues. While Project Guardian sounds like a good thing, it prioritizes only certain people getting harassed on the platform. In contrast, other ‘regular’ accounts have to wait longer and deal with internet trolls without any special treatment.
