Stone left Twitter in 2011 but returned in 2017 to work on the company’s “culture, energy and feel.” It turned out to be a lot of work on Twitter’s content management practices. Stone rarely tweets himself, but he has occasionally delivered some impassioned speeches, especially when he and his co-workers were criticized for how the social site fueled violent discourse. Posting hate speech on the platform is a sensitive issue for Stone, so when Musk fired the trust and safety team His, cut his fake news managers and allowed big right-wing figures, disinformation purveyors, as well as outright neo-Nazis to return to the platform, understandably upset him. He told the Guardian “We’ve made a lot of improvements in those areas. All that’s gone now.”
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Stone also criticized Musk’s handling of criticism, banning speech he doesn’t like. Musk briefly banned journalists from the platform alongside an account that uses public information to track Musk’s private jet, though that account is now back online with an enforced 24-hour delay. “You have to be okay with things that you just don’t like or don’t agree to be there,” Stone said.