Related Post
(Trends Wide) — Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, stated last month that “hate speech impressions” had dropped dramatically on the platform since he took over.
It was a remarkable claim, given that Musk carried out mass layoffs and fired hundreds of employees, draining the company of much-needed resources to enforce content moderation policies, which the billionaire also publicly criticized.
On Friday, two watchdog groups released research indicating that Musk’s claim simply doesn’t hold up, offering one of the clearest pictures to date of the rising tide of hate speech on the platform.
The Center to Counter Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League said in reports that the volume of hate speech on Twitter grew dramatically under Musk’s leadership.
Specifically, the Center to Counter Digital Hate said that the daily use of the so-called ‘n-word’ -word’ or ‘word with n’) under Musk is triple the 2022 average and the use of slurs against gay men and transgender people increased 58% and 62%, respectively.
For its part, the Anti-Defamation League said in a separate report that its data shows “both an increase in anti-Semitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of anti-Semitic posts.”
Both groups have expressed alarm at what they are seeing happening on Twitter, one of the most influential communication platforms in the world.
The Anti-Defamation League described the deteriorating state of affairs as a “troubling situation” that is “likely to get worse, given reported cutbacks in Twitter’s content moderation staff.”
The reports come just hours after Kanye West’s Twitter account was suspended after he posted an altered image of the Star of David with a swastika inside and appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars show, in which he praised Hitler.
Imrad Ahmed, executive director of the Center to Counter Digital Hate, said Musk had “sent the bat-signal to all manner of racists, misogynists and homophobes that Twitter was open for business, and they have reacted accordingly.”
“A safe space for hate is a hostile environment for most decent people,” Ahmed added, “by comparison, who would want to sit in a cafe or pub where madmen are shouting expletives and intolerance, and have the nerve to claim that this is a democratically essential debate?”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday morning.
Musk has repeatedly said he wants to reverse many of the content moderation policies that were in place before he took over the company, saying he only wants speech to be banned when it incites violence or violates the law.
The billionaire has already reversed Twitter’s previous covid misinformation rules and said he plans to grant a “general amnesty” to people who were previously banned from the platform for violating Twitter’s rules.
