Data collected by CyberWell found that while only 2 percent of anti-Semitism content on social media platforms in 2022 was violent, 90 percent came from Twitter. And Cohen Montemayor points out that even the company’s standard moderation systems would probably have struggled under the pressure of so much hateful content. “If you are experiencing spikes [of online hate speech] and nothing has changed in the content moderation infrastructure, that means it’s leaving more hate speech on the platform,” she says.
Civil society organizations that used to have a direct line to Twitter’s policy and moderation teams have struggled to raise their concerns, says Isedua Oribhabor, business and human rights lead at Access Now. “We’ve seen failure in those aspects of the platform to moderate correctly and provide the services the way it used to for its users,” she says.
Daniel Hickey, a visiting scholar at USC’s Institute for Information Sciences and co-author of the paper, says Twitter’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess whether there was simply more hate speech on the platform or whether the company made substantive changes to its policies. . after the Musk acquisition. “It’s often quite difficult to untangle because Twitter isn’t going to be completely transparent about this kind of thing,” he says.
That lack of transparency is likely to get worse. Twitter announced in February that no longer allow free access to your AP, the tool that allows academics and researchers to download and interact with the data from the platform. “For researchers who want to get a broader view of how hate speech is changing as Elon Musk is at the helm of the company for longer and longer, that is certainly much more difficult now,” Hickey says.
In the months since Musk took over Twitter, major public media outlets like National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Company, and other public media outlets have abandoned the platform after being labeled “state-sponsored,” a designation previously only used for Russians. , Chinese and Iranian state media. Yesterday Musk reportedly threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter handle.
Meanwhile, real state-sponsored media seem to be thriving on Twitter. an april report of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory found that after Twitter stopped deleting these accounts, they gained tens of thousands of new followers.
In December, accounts that had been previously prohibited allowed back on the platform, including right-wing academic Jordan Peterson and prominent misogynist Andrew Tate, who was later arrested in Romania for human smuggling. Liz Crokin, a proponent of the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, was also reinstated under Musk’s leadership. In March 16Crokin falsely alleged in a tweet that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel had featured a pedophile symbol in a skit on his show.
Recent changes to Twitter’s verification system, Twitter Blue, where users can pay to get blue checkmarks and more prominence on the platform, also contributed to the chaos. In November, a tweet from a False account posing as the corporate giant Eli Lilly announced that insulin was free. The tweet caused the company’s shares to fall nearly 5 percent. But Ahmed says the implications for pay-to-play verification are much clearer.
“Our analysis showed that Twitter Blue was being used as a weapon, particularly by people who were spreading disinformation,” says Ahmed of CCHR. “Scientists, journalists, they find themselves in an incredibly hostile environment where their information is not getting the reach that bad actors spreading disinformation and hate enjoy.”
Despite Twitter’s protests, Ahmed says, the study validates what many civil society organizations have been saying for months. “Twitter’s strategy in response to all this massive data from different organizations showing that things were getting worse was to criticize us and say, ‘No, we have data that shows otherwise.'”
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