Elon Musk has slammed a report from Britain’s BBC that claims hate speech directed at women has increased on Twitter since he acquired the social media platform.
Citing data from the UK think tank Strategic Dialogue, the publicly funded broadcaster wrote on Monday there was a 69% increase in new Twitter accounts created after entrepreneurs took over that followed misogynistic and violent profiles.
The claims in the story contradict past claims by Musk that hate speech has declined after a brief spike when he acquired the company in late October for $44 billion.
“Sorry to turn Twitter from a nurturing paradise to a place that has … trolls,” he said tweeted in response, send a picture of the article from “the organization calls itself [the] BBC”.
EXCL: A Twitter insider told me and BBC Panorama that it cannot protect its users from trolling, state-coordinated disinformation and child exploitation. Exclusive data and testimonies of Twitter users show hate & trolls flourish. BBC One, 8PM.https://t.co/EhfMapHayV
– Marianna Spring (@mariannaspring) March 6, 2023
Musk has been the subject of lightning controversy since his self-described “absolute free speech” bought the company by force.
Just hours after he appeared at headquarters for the first time carrying a sink prop as a joke, he circulated false claims that an attack on the husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may have been a gay lover’s quarrel. Musk later apologized in January.
In addition, after promising from the start that Twitter would not become a toxic cesspool for advertisers, it vowed to launch “thermonuclear name & shame“The campaign is against companies that stop spending on Twitter ads.
Moderate influencers like Esther Crawford, who reportedly helped broker a rift between Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook, have since been ousted.
The BBC report also spoke to former staff including Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter’s former head of content design and one of the people who specialized in introducing features designed to protect users from hate.
After Musk fired the entire team, Jennings Young told the British broadcaster that he had chosen to leave at the end of November and was unable to identify features that helped reduce online attacks.
“There is no one to work with now,” he said in the report.
Twitter aims to replace the mainstream media as a news gathering force
Musk’s derisive reaction to the report should come as no surprise.
Centibillionaire is a strong critic of trained journalists, to the point of cutting off all lines of communication by firing the entire public relations department of Twitter in line with the measures taken long ago at Tesla.
Instead, he wants to position Twitter as a newsgatherer that relies heavily on an army of volunteer “citizen journalists” who he claims are more reliable than professional media with an editorial slant.
Hate speech impressions are down 1/3 from pre-spike levels. Congratulations to the Twitter team! pic.twitter.com/5BWaQoIlip
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022
But Musk has tweaked the platform’s recommendation algorithm to boost customer reach for $8 per month as a perk of Twitter Blue’s service in a pay-to-play type of scheme.
“When Twitter pursues its goal of promoting citizen journalism, the media elite will try everything to prevent that from happening,” he said. delivered in November. In January he then commented “the media wants to control what you know”.
Musk also angered human rights groups after he fired a team responsible for monitoring human rights and hate speech, for example in foreign languages that artificial intelligence struggles to contextualize and filter.
“We’re not talking about…pain, we’re talking about preventing dangerous genocidal hate speech,” the executive director of the human rights group Equality Labs told reporters in late November. “It only takes four hours from a tweet to experience mass atrocities in the context of India.”
In an effort to restore confidence that post-Musk Twitter no longer puts a toe on the scale of social debate, a criticism leveled at previous management, Musk promised last month to reveal the internal workings of creating a platform-exclusive recommendation algorithm. open source.
However, despite promising to do so before March, they have yet to deliver.
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