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New Twitter owner Elon Musk stated last month that “hate speech impressions” on the platform had dropped dramatically since he took over.
It was a remarkable claim, given that Musk has conducted mass layoffs and fired hundreds of employees, depleting the company’s much-needed resources to enforce content moderation policies, which the billionaire has also publicly criticized.
On Friday, two watchdog groups published research indicating that Musk’s claim was simply false, providing one of the clearest images yet of the platform’s swelling wave of hate speech.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League both said in reports that hate speech on Twitter has increased dramatically under Musk’s leadership.
Specifically, the Center for Countering Digital Hate said daily use of the n-word under Musk is three times the 2022 average and that use of slurs against gay men and trans people has increased by 58% and 62%, respectively.
And 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 moderation of anti-Semitic posts.”
Both groups expressed alarm at what they see 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 the reported cuts to 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 in it and appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars, where he praised Hitler.
Imrad Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said Musk had “sent the bat signal to every sort of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business, and they’ve responded 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 lunatics shout expletives and bigotry, let alone be the chutzpah to claim it was a democratically essential debate?”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning.
On Friday afternoon, Musk responded to a DailyExpertNews article about the investigation by tweeting “completely untrue,” without specifying which aspect of the reporting he was disputing. He then repeated his claim that “hate speech impressions”, or the number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, “continues to decline” since his early days as owner of the company when the platform saw a spike in hate speech, intended to boost Musk’s tolerance To test .
However, the research by CCDH and ADL claims to show a different phenomenon, highlighting the frequency and incidence of hate speech on the platform in general.
Musk said that in the future, Twitter will share its data on hate speech impressions on a weekly basis.
Musk has repeatedly said he wants to reverse many of the content moderation policies in place before he took over the company, and has indicated that he only wants speech banned if it incites violence or violates the law.
The billionaire has already reversed Twitter’s previous Covid rules on misleading information, saying he intends to grant “general amnesty” to people previously banned for breaking Twitter rules.
“These changes are already impacting the spread of hate on Twitter, and the return of extremists of all kinds to the platform has the potential to fuel the spread of extremist content and disinformation,” the Anti-Defamation League said. “This could also lead to more user harassment.”
– DailyExpertNews’s Brian Fung contributed to this report.