: A Brief History of Elon Musk Saying One Thing and Doing Another at Twitter Musk’s argument “doesn’t hold water,” said Hood, who noted that both volume and engagement of hate speech has gone up, according to the CCDH. During the first three months of Musk’s tenure the rate of daily tweets containing slurs against Black Americans more than tripled, the organization said, basing its research on social media analysis tool Brandwatch. From October through March, tweets referring to the LGBTQ+ community alongside slurs such as “groomer” rose 119%. Online hate often leads to real harm: reports of harassment on Twitter rose 6% this year, according to the ADL. “Musk has repeatedly said that hate speech has decreased on the platform, but based on the data studies that we have done, we have not seen that,” said Kayla Gorgarty, deputy research director at Media Matters. “We have seen the opposite.” Twitter’s approach to managing hate speech focuses on limiting the number of times people see it, not the volume of the content itself, the company told Bloomberg. Twitter said impressions of hate speech content are 30% lower on average than before Musk’s acquisition. The company also noted that “groomer” is not considered a slur in their policy standards, but is a violation of their hateful conduct policy when grouped with words that are harmful towards a protected category group. Twitter users have also reported seeing violent and sexually explicit content on the platform. Video from a mass shooting at a Texas mall earlier this year was shared openly on Twitter for hours before the company took action; so was a video of a cat in a blender. More than 30% of U.S. adults that used Twitter between March and May reported seeing content they consider bad for the world, according to a survey conducted by the USC Marshall Neely Social Media Index. That percentage was higher than rivals Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Many users reported seeing tweets that condoned or glorified violence towards marginalized groups or explicit videos easily accessible to underage children. Earlier this year, researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found that Twitter failed to take down dozens of images of child sex abuse. The team identified 128 Twitter accounts selling child sex abuse material and 43 instances of known CSAM. “It is very surprising for any known CSAM to publicly appear on major social media platforms,” said lead author and chief technologist David Thiel. Twitter responded to the issue after being contacted by researchers. This year Twitter removed 525% more accounts related to child sexual exploitation content than a year ago, according to the company. Twitter has been slow to catch and remove some harmful content since Musk fired or faced resignations for nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff, including the bulk of the trust and safety team, which is responsible for managing responses to content reports. On average, only 28% of antisemitic tweets reported by the ADL between December and January were removed or sanctioned. The group found the posts by drawing a 1% sample of all posts from Twitter’s API, or application programming interface. Twitter has since restricted the reported tweets that were found to violate policies, the company said. “Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we have seen the platform go from having one of the best trust and safety divisions in the industry, to one of the worst,” said Nadim Nashif, director at the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. During Musk’s tenure, content from extremist political groups and misinformation related to national politics have increased. QAnon-related hashtags rose 91% in May compared with a year earlier, with the majority of those tweets occurring in the last six months, according to research from the ADL. In the first six months under Musk, nearly a quarter of the top Covid-19 related tweets included information about vaccines that is unproved and untested, according to research done by Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog group funded by donors. In November, Twitter removed bans against Covid-19 misinformation. The challenge with the freedom of speech, not reach policy is, “there’s no way to verify what’s actually de-amplified,” said Yael Eisenstat, head of the Center for Technology and Society at the ADL. Meanwhile, Musk himself has also engaged with extremist voices, replying to antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-trans narratives, which boosts those posts because he is followed by 148 million people.