Tweets with racial slurs soar since Musk takeover: Report
Instances of racial slurs have soared on Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the influential platform, despite assurances from the platform that it had reduced hateful activity, a digital civil rights group reported Thursday.
Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the number of tweets containing one of several different racial slurs soared in the week after Musk bought Twitter.
A racial epithet used to attack Black people was found more than 26,000 times, three times the average for 2022. Use of a slur that targets trans people increased 53%, while instances of an offensive term for homosexual men went up 39% over the yearly average.
Examples of offensive terms used to target Jews and Hispanics also increased.
All told, 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 figures show that despite claims from Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, that the platform had succeeded in reducing the number of times hate speech was being seen on Twitter’s search and trending page, the actual volume of hateful tweets has spiked,” according to the analysis from the center, a nonprofit with offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom.
On Wednesday Roth acknowledged the recent increase in hate speech on the site but said the platform had made significant progress in bringing the numbers down.
“We’ve put a stop to the spike in hateful conduct, but that the level of hateful activity on the service is now about 95% lower than it was before the acquisition,” Roth said in remarks broadcast live on Twitter. “Changes that we’ve made and the proactive enforcement that we carried out are making Twitter safer relative to where it was before.”
On Oct....