In the wake of Elon Musk who launched Twitter Inc. bought, a flood of defamation and racist memes swelled on the platform, raising concerns that the site is entering an era of hate speech.
Twitter has long struggled to fairly enforce content policies on its platform to appease the advertisers, users, and powerful world leaders who use its service. But when Musk, a self-proclaimed “absolute freedom of speech,” took over ownership of the company, some conservative officials, partisan extremists and conspiracy peddlers saw reason to celebrate the change.
It seems like this is a group of people who think the rules magically changed once he signed on the dotted line,” said Katie Harbath, the chief executive officer and founder of Anchor Change and former director of public policy at Facebook.
dr. Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, said that once Musk took control of Twitter, online trolls started encouraging each other to push the boundaries on Twitter.
“Unfortunately, this spike in hate speech is completely predictable,” said Tromble, who has studied Twitter for years. “For most of these trolls, it’s a game. But for others, including certain political influencers, saying hateful, outlandish things helps increase their audience and make money. And they see this as a golden opportunity to get even more attention.” to get.”
The flow of speech underscores the difficulty Musk faces in delivering on his promise to allow people to speak freely again while also managing the platform’s palatability for advertisers, to whom he promised in a letter Thursday that Twitter would not. would grow into a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership. Musk has repeatedly opposed Twitter’s enforcement strategies, such as permanently banning some high-profile accounts.
Musk tweeted that Twitter will form a content moderation board that includes “very disparate points of view.” Important decisions about the content and recovery of the account will be suspended until the group is convened, he said.
Although Musk has already fired four Twitter executives, including Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal, policy and trust, who headed a team that made decisions about permanently banning certain high-profile accounts, he has yet to made no concrete or substantial changes to Twitter’s moderation policy. Still, some conservative politicians and pundits saw the platform coming into his possession on Friday as a symbolic victory.
Twitter will form a content moderation board with widely divergent views.
There will be no major content decisions or account recovery before that council meets.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
“FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, posted from her official Twitter account Thursday night, minutes after news of Musk’s takeover of Twitter broke. Greene’s personal account was permanently banned by Twitter earlier this year for repeated violations of its Covid-19 disinformation policy. “Just wait until tomorrow,” she said in another tweet a minute later.
On Friday, Greene simply tweeted, “We’re winning.” According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the congresswoman gained at least 40,492 new followers in the hours since Musk took over Twitter.
Rep. Ohio Republican Jim Jordan also applauded Musk’s takeover of Twitter with a Friday morning message: “Freedom of speech. Liberal tears.” According to Bloomberg’s analysis, he gained at least 40,419 followers in the same time frame.
Freedom of opinion. Liberal tears.
— Representative Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 28, 2022
Other partisan accounts with reports of repeatedly false claims that the 2020 US presidential election had been stolen tested the limits of speech under Twitter’s Musk regime. Robby Starbuck, a former Congressional candidate in Tennessee and a pro-Trump activist, published a transphobic and misinformation-laden tweet Thursday night, which prefaced the post with, “Just test the new Twitter.” The post garnered 80,870 likes and shares on the platform.
An influential anonymous account with nearly 1 million followers, called @catturd2, complained that it had been “shadow banned” on Twitter. On Friday morning, it was one of the few accounts to which Twitter’s new chief responded, “I’ll dig in more today.”
The Starbuck and @catturd2 accounts appeared on the list of repeat spreaders of misinformation in a peer-reviewed report by the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of research organizations studying disinformation campaigns, including in the 2020 elections.
According to an analysis by Bloomberg, dozens of anonymous trolls have signed up to Twitter in the past day, raising topics that have historically been heavily moderated by Twitter — such as lifting hate speech against protected groups and promoting falsehoods about Covid- 19 and its vaccines.
Overnight, the platform has seen racial slurs, anti-Semitic speech and abusive memes, with users booing each other on far-right message boards like The Donald, and on messaging apps like Telegram and on internet forums like 4chan.
Thursday afternoon remained a low-volume racist slur on Twitter, with less than a dozen mentions every five minutes across the platform, according to data from Dataminr, a social media analytics platform. After the news broke that Musk closed the deal on Twitter, there was a 1,300% increase in word appearing on the platform in several languages, including Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. At its peak, according to the data, the word appeared 170 times every five minutes.
Mentions of ivermectin, the anthelmintic popular among those seeking alternative treatments for Covid-19, despite a lack of strong research to back it up, also skyrocketed 2,900% on Twitter, peaking at 358 mentions to support it. five minutes, according to Dataminr.
And mentions of “plandemic,” short for a conspiracy in which a shadowy cabal of elites used the coronavirus pandemic and a potential vaccine to make a profit and rise to power, rose.
On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism said it had identified a coordinated effort to spread anti-Semitic content on Twitter “explicitly inspired by the Elon Musk takeover”. The group said it had identified more than 1,200 tweets and retweets on the platform in the past day that spread anti-Semitic memes.
Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said in an interview that Musk publicly took responsibility for substantive decisions for an entire social network while holding business interests in other parts of the world was unprecedented.
“He has another company that gets a quarter of its revenue from the People’s Republic of China,” Stamos said, referring to Musk’s Tesla Inc. business in China. “That’s amazingly different from anything that ever happened.”
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev welcomed Musk to the platform with his own post. “Good luck @elonmusk in overcoming political bias and ideological dictatorship on Twitter,” he said Friday. He added an appeal: “Stop that Starlink in Ukraine.”
Good luck @Elon Musk in overcoming political bias and ideological dictatorship on Twitter. And stop the Starlink in Ukraine case
— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) October 28, 2022
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
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