Saturday, December 3, 2022

New Report Confirms Hate Speech Is At An All-Time High On Twitter

Despite billionaire Elon Musk’s grand claims about hate speech decline under his leadership, a new report is proving otherwise.

The Tesla CEO and Twitter chief may be getting a rude awakening about hate speech impressions. And that’s all thanks to a new study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Musk said that hate speech was down by one-third last week but this study says it has risen during that same period that he acquired the company.

On average, around 1,300 tweets have come forward with slurs against people of color that continually appear on a daily basis on the app, right before Elon Musk took over.

This number then went on to jump to a figure of 3880 after his acquisition of the platform. And it’s interesting to note how the figure further surged to 4650 when Musk made the shocking claims of hate being so low on the app.

So many slurs have risen against 62% of the trans population since Twitter had a new leader and that’s about 5100 tweets on a daily basis, as confirmed by the study. This data was brought forward by Brandwatch, which is deemed to be a leading tool for determining analytics on social media. It also entails tweets from different locations around the globe and arises in English too.

A tweet conducted during the middle part of November by Musk stated that all hate-themed tweets would be deboosted on the platform and curbed to the point where they would be demonetized. This way, users wouldn’t be coming across it too frequently, unless and until they actually went on to look for it.

But in cases where views were at an all-time low, the researchers of this study saw how the engagement for posts linked to hate speech is so high since Musk started taking over the firm.

People are just engaging so much more on such posts with likes, replies, and retweets linked to slurs going to be so high, especially in the weeks that lead up to the launch of Twitter 2.0. And if we had to put it into figures, hate speech is up by 50%.

The report basically contradicts what Musk has been saying and it’s quite interesting, to say the least. Hence, Musk was certainly not happy with the news and slapped the report as one that was utterly false.

In the same way, he vowed to put up daily statistics for data publishing and says he maintains all the impressions coming forward regarding hate speech.

Ever since Musk decided to take charge of Twitter, we’ve seen so much change come forward. The decisions have been erratic and moderation has gone out the window. Polls have been conducted that hint toward the Twitter Chief’s next move.

His idea of creating a Twitter moderation council is also done and dusted. And with the likes of Trump back on the app, one can only wonder what could possibly be next.


Read next: Twitter Is Adding A Verified Phone Number Check Mark In The Profile Info Section
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

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