Racial slurs surge Twitter since Elon Musk A digital civil rights group reported Thursday that it bought the influential platform despite assurances it had reduced hate activity.
researchers in Centre for Combating Digital Hate The number of tweets found to contain one of several different racial slurs spiked a week later Musk buys Twitter.
Racial nicknames used to attack black people were found more than 26,000 times, triple the 2022 average. The use of slurs directed at transgender people increased by 53%, while the use of offensive terms against gay men increased by 39% on average.
Examples of offensive terms used against Jews and Hispanics also increased.
In all, the researchers looked at nearly 80,000 English-language tweets and retweets from around the world that contained one of the offensive terms they searched for.
“The data shows that despite claims by Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, that the platform has successfully reduced the number of times hate speech is seen on Twitter’s search and trending pages, the actual number of hate tweets has soared,” according to the center Analysis of , a non-profit organization with offices in the US and UK.
On Wednesday, Ross acknowledged a recent increase in hate speech on the site, but said the platform has made significant progress in reducing the amount.
“We’ve stopped the surge in hateful behavior, but the level of hateful activity on the service is now about 95 percent lower than it was before the acquisition,” Ross said in comments broadcast live on Twitter. “The changes we’ve made and the aggressive enforcement we’ve undertaken are making Twitter safer than it was before.”
On October 31, Twitter announced that it had removed 1,500 accounts for posting hate speech. The company also said it has significantly reduced the visibility of posts containing defamation, making them harder to find on the platform.
“Actually, we’ve seen hate speech (star) at times this week below (star) our previous norm, contrary to what you might read in the media,” Musk tweeted last week.
Musk Describing himself as an absolutist of free speech, he is widely expected to revise Twitter’s content moderation policy.While he said no changes have been made so far, Musk has made Mass layoffs In the company, Questioning its ability to police misinformation and hate speech, especially in the days leading up to the 2022 election.
Renee DiResta, research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, said it may take some time to accurately assess the platform’s performance in the election and determine whether Twitter is taking a different approach to content that violates its policies.
“The civic integrity policy has not changed,” DiResta said of Twitter under the new ownership. “Right now, there’s a difference between making policy and enforcing it.”
Shortly after Musk bought Twitter, some users posted hate speech in what appeared to be a test of the platform’s boundaries under the new owner.
Within 12 hours of Musk’s purchase An analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a Princeton, N.J.-based company that tracks disinformation, showed that citations to specific racist epithets used to demean black people jumped 500 percent when they were finalized.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the findings of the new report on Thursday.
Associated Press David Klepper
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