The sudden departure of Twitter executives tasked with content moderation and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech.
On Thursday, Twitter\u2019s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned from the company. Following Irwin\u2019s departure, the company\u2019s head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, reportedly left, as did Maie Aiyed, a program manager who worked on brand-safety partnerships.
It\u2019s been just over seven months since Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, an investment that has so far been a giant money loser. Musk has dramatically downsized the company\u2019s workforce and rolled back policies that restricted what kinds of content could circulate. In response, numerous brands suspended or decreased their advertising spending, as several civil rights groups have documented.
Twitter, under Musk, is the fourth most-hated brand in the U.S., according to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation rankings.
The controversy surrounding Musk\u2019s control of Twitter continues to build.
This week, Musk said that it\u2019s not against Twitter\u2019s terms of service to misgender trans people on the platform. He said doing so is merely \u201crude\u201d but not illegal.\u201d LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers dispute his position, claiming it invites bullying of trans people. On Friday, Musk encouraged his 141.8 million followers to watch a video, posted to Twitter, that was deemed transphobic by these groups.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations expressed dismay to NBC News over Musk\u2019s decision, saying the company\u2019s new policies will lead to an uptick in anti-trans hate speech and online abuse.
Although Musk recently hired former NBC Universal global advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to succeed him as CEO, it\u2019s unclear how the new boss will assuage advertisers\u2019 concerns regarding racist, antisemitic, transphobic and homophobic content in light of the recent departures and Musk\u2019s ongoing role as majority owner and technology chief.
Even before the latest high-profile exits, Musk had been reducing the number of workers tasked with safety and content moderation as part of the company\u2019s widespread layoffs. He eliminated the entire artificial intelligence ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring that harmful content wasn\u2019t being algorithmically recommended to users.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has recently played down concerns about the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter. He claimed during 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 slashed \u201cspam, scams and bots\u201d by \u201cat least 90%.\u201d
Experts and ad industry insiders told CNBC that there\u2019s no evidence to support those claims. Some say Twitter is actively impeding independent researchers who are attempting to track such metrics.
Twitter didn\u2019t provide a comment for this story.
The state of hate speech on Twitter
In a paper published in April that will be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Web and Social Media in Cyprus, researchers from Oregon State, 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 containing hateful content and slurs targeting Blacks, Asians, LGTBQ groups and others increased such tweeting \u201cdramatically following Musk\u2019s takeover\u201d and do not show signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter hasn\u2019t made progress on bots, which have remained as prevalent and active on the social media platform as they were prior to Musk\u2019s tenure.
Musk previously indicated that Twitter\u2019s recommendation algorithms surface less offensive content to people who don\u2019t want to see it.
Keith Burghardt, one of the authors of the paper and a computer scientist at the University of Southern California\u2019s Information Sciences Institute, told CNBC that the deluge of hate speech and other explicit content correlates to the reduction of people working on\u2002trust and safety issues and the relaxed content-moderation policies.
Musk also said at the WSJ event that \u201cmost advertisers\u201d had come back to Twitter.
Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said it\u2019s not clear how many advertisers have resumed spending but that \u201cmany advertisers remain on pause, as Twitter has limited reach compared to some other platforms.\u201d
Jones said many advertisers are waiting to see how levels of \u201ctoxicity\u201d and hate speech on Twitter change as the site appears to slant toward more right-wing users and as the U.S. election season draws near. He said one big challenge for brands is that Musk and Twitter haven\u2019t made clear what they count in their measurements assessing hate speech, spam, scams and bots.
Researchers are calling on the billionaire Twitter owner to provide data to back up his recent claims.
\u201cMore data is critical to really understand whether there is a continuous decrease in either hate speech or bots,\u201d Burghardt said. \u201cThat again emphasizes the need for greater transparency and for academics to have freely available data.\u201d
Show us the data
Getting that data is becoming harder.
Twitter recently started charging companies for access to its application programing interface (API), which allows them to incorporate and analyze Twitter data. The lowest-paid tier costs $42,000 for 50 million tweets.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate nonprofit, said that because researchers now have \u201cto pay a fortune\u201d to access the API, they\u2019re having to rely on other potential routes to the data.
\u201cTwitter under Elon Musk has been more opaque,\u201d Ahmed said.
He added that Twitter\u2019s search function is less effective than in the past and that view counts, as seen on certain tweets, can suddenly change, making them unstable to use.
\u201cWe no longer have any confidence in the accuracy of the data,\u201d Ahmed said.
The CCDH analyzed a series of tweets from the beginning of 2022 through Feb. 28, 2023. It released a report in March analyzing over 1.7 million tweets collected using a data-scraping tool and Twitter\u2019s search function and discovered that tweets mentioning the grooming narrative have risen 119% since Musk took over.
That refers to \u201cthe false and hateful lie\u201d that the LGBTQ+ community grooms children, according to the report. The CCDH report found that a small number of popular Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers have been driving the \u201chateful \u2018grooming\u2019 narrative online.\u201d
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, continues to find antisemitic posts on Twitter. The group recently conducted its 2023 study of digital terrorism and hate on social platforms and graded Twitter a D-, putting it on par with Russia\u2019s VK as the worst in the world for large social networks.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action agenda at the center, called on Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise of hate speech on Twitter. He said he has yet to receive a response.
\u201cThey need to look at it seriously,\u201d Cooper said. If they don\u2019t, he said, lawmakers are going to be called upon to \u201cdo something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n