Twitter Claims It’s Combating Hate Speech. But Evidence Says Otherwise – Them

As Twitter continues to disintegrate in increasingly less entertaining ways, the companys new leadership insists that hate speech on the platform just hit a record low despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

In a statement released via the official Twitter Safety account Tuesday afternoon, the company claimed that more than 99% of content [that] users and advertisers see on Twitter is healthy. The statement also included details of a new and ostensibly independent analysis of all content posted between April and May of this year, including the assertion that there are now 30% fewer impressions of hate speech across Twitter compared with last year, before billionaire Elon Musk bought the company. The analysis was carried out by the business management firm Sprinklr, which used an AI-based language learning model to determine the reach of posts containing hate speech.

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Over the past 8 months, weve made progress on reducing the spread of hate speech, proactively preventing child exploitation, and giving brands more control over where their ads appear from adjacency controls to third-party verification, said Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, in a separate statement Wednesday morning.

Yaccarino released her statement in direct response to a Bloomberg report that found levels of hate speech, graphic violence, child sex abuse material, and other harmful content had dramatically increased since Musks buyout, spooking advertsers. Yaccarino accused Bloomberg of using incorrect, misleading, and outdated metrics in its report.

Of course, its pretty easy to say youve reduced hate speech on your platform when you also take a narrow view of how that term can even be applied. In April which conveniently happens to be when this latest dataset begins the Twitter Safety team removed misgendering and deadnaming from the list of behaviors that violate its community guidelines, meaning a huge amount of targeted anti-transgender harassment would likely no longer be considered harmful by Twitters definition.

But read each corporate statement carefully, and youll see that Yaccarino and Twitter arent actually reducing hate speech on the platform just controling how many people see it, specifically their advertising partners. Twitters April stealth update coincided with another major policy change often summarized as freedom of speech, not reach. Rather than remove hate speech and other rule violations outright, platform moderators (the few that are left, anyway) instead label such posts to flag them as hate speech and hide them from view. In particular, as Yaccarino put it in her statement, we proactively prevent all ads from appearing adjacent to any content that's labeled.

In other words, Yaccarino, Musk, and their team are pulling a bait-and-switch by talking about impressions when everyone else is discussing volume and impact. Twitter isn't actually tracking how much hate speech and other harmful content gets posted or if they are, they certainly arent disclosing those numbers. Instead, theyre only seem to be interested in how often anyone notices how much harmful content still around. Its like that old saying goes: If someone says a slur in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did we just solve racism?

That Musk and Yaccarino seem more concerned with making Twitter appear safe than actually making it safe is horrible, but it doesnt come as much of a surprise. Musk has made no secret of his own anti-transgender views, declaring the adjective cisgender to be a slur last month, unbanning anti-trans ideologues like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and regularly boosting anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda from the likes of Libs of TikTok and Matt Walsh. Yaccarino is herself a former Donald Trump appointee who follows dozens of the worst offenders on Twitter, from GOP politicians and conspiracy theorists such as Jack Posobiec to what certainly look like random QAnon reply guys.

Yaccarino and Musk are directly responsible for the toxic state of Twitter and they cannot simply hand wave away the fact that the platform remains dangerous to consumers and advertisers, said Media Matters for America vice president Julie Millican in an emailed statement to Them. [MMFA] and others have repeatedly found corporate advertising appearing alongside Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, anti-LGBTQ extremists and more which raises additional questions about Yaccarinos claims that advertisers have greater control about where their ads appear.

Sadly, it looks like the platform where so many of us built connections and communities is truly crumbling under the weight of its leaders terrible politics. To barely closeted extremists like Musk, Twitter being infested with reactionary bile isnt a downside, its a feature.

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Twitter Claims It's Combating Hate Speech. But Evidence Says Otherwise - Them

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