Global Courant
Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks to CNBC on May 16, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
The sudden departure of Twitter executives charged with content moderation and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech.
Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, resigned from the company on Thursday. Following the departure of Irwin, AJ Brown, the company’s head of brand safety and ad quality, Reportedly leftas was Maie Aiyed, a program manager who worked on brand safety partnerships.
It’s been just over seven months since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, an investment that so far has giant money loser. Musk drastically reduced the company’s workforce and reversed policies that limited what kind of content could circulate. In response, numerous brands have suspended or reduced their ad spend, as several civil rights groups have documented.
Twitter is the fourth most hated brand in the US, behind Musk, according to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation ranking.
The controversy surrounding Musk’s control of Twitter continues to grow.
This week, Musk said it’s not against Twitter’s terms of service to misinterpret transgender people on the platform. He said this is just “rude” but not illegal. LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers dispute his position, claiming it invites transgender bullying. On Friday, Musk promoted a video on Twitter that was considered transphobic by these groups.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations expressed their displeasure NBC news on Musk’s decision, saying the company’s new policies will lead to an increase in anti-trans hate speech and online abuse.
While Musk recently hired Linda Yaccarino, NBC Universal’s former global advertising chief, to succeed him as CEO, it’s unclear how the new boss will address advertisers’ concerns about racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and homophobic content in the face of the recent departure and continued role of Musk. as majority shareholder and technology chief.
Even before the latest high-profile exits, Musk had reduced the number of employees charged with security and content moderation as part of the company’s widespread layoffs. He took out the entire AI ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring that malicious content was not algorithmically recommended to users.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently downplayed concerns about the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter. He claimed at a Wall Street Journal event that since he took over the company in October, hate speech on the platform has declined and that Twitter has reduced “spam, scams and bots” by “at least 90%”.
Ad industry experts and insiders told CNBC that there is no evidence to support these claims. Some say Twitter is actively obstructing independent researchers trying to track such statistics.
Twitter has not commented on this story.
The state of hate speech on Twitter
In a newspaper published in April, which will be presented at the upcoming International Web and Social Media Conference in Cyprus, researchers from Oregon State, the University of Southern California and other institutions showed that hate speech has increased since Musk bought Twitter.
The authors wrote that the accounts known for posts with hateful content and insults aimed at blacks, Asians, LGTBQ groups and others, this tweeting has increased “drastically after Musk’s takeover” and shows no signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter has made no headway on bots, which have remained as prevalent and active on Twitter as they were before Musk’s tenure.
Musk rather indicated that Twitter’s recommendation algorithms show less offensive content to people who don’t want to see it.
Keith Burghardt, one of the authors of the article and a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, told CNBC that the deluge of hate speech and other explicit content correlates with the reduction in people working on trust and safety issues. and the relaxed content moderation policy.
Musk also said at the WSJ event that “most advertisers” had returned to Twitter.
Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said it’s not clear how many advertisers have resumed spending, but that “many advertisers remain on hiatus as Twitter has limited reach compared to some other platforms.”
Jones said many advertisers are waiting to see how levels of “toxicity” and hate speech on Twitter change as the site appears to gravitate towards more right-wing users and as the US election approaches. He said a major challenge for brands is that Musk and Twitter have not made clear what they count when assessing hate speech, spam, scams and bots.
Investigators are calling on Musk to provide data to back up his recent claims.
“More data is critical to really understanding whether there is a continued decline in hate speech or bots,” said Burghardt. “That again highlights the need for more transparency and for academics to have freely available data.”
Show us the data
It’s getting harder and harder to get that information.
Twitter recently started charging companies for access to its Application Programming Interface (API), which allows them to integrate and analyze Twitter data. The lowest paid tier costs $42,000 for 50 million tweets.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, said that because researchers now “have to pay a fortune” to access the API, they have to rely on other possible routes to the data.
“Twitter under Elon Musk was more opaque,” Ahmed said.
He added that Twitter’s search function is less effective than in the past and the number of views, as seen on certain tweets, can suddenly change, making them unstable to use.
“We no longer have confidence in the accuracy of the data,” Ahmed said.
The CCDH analyzed a series of tweets from early 2022 through February 28, 2023. a report analyzed more than 1.7 million tweets collected using a data-scraping tool and Twitter’s search function in March and found that the number of tweets mentioning the hateful “grooming” story had risen 119% since Musk took over.
That refers to “the false and hateful lie” that the LGBTQ+ community cares for children. The CCDH found that a small number of popular Twitter accounts, such as Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers, have driven the “hateful ‘grooming’ narrative online.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, continues to find anti-Semitic posts on Twitter. The group recently executed its 2023 survey of digital terrorism and hate on social platforms and gave Twitter a D-, tying it with Russia’s UK as the world’s worst for major social networks.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of the Center’s Global Social Action Agenda, called on Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise of hate speech on Twitter. He said he had not yet received a response.
“They need to take a serious look at it,” Cooper said. If they don’t, he said, lawmakers will be called upon to “do something about it.”
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