Floodgates opened for hate speech against black, transgenders after Elon Musk's Twitter takeover

Hate speech against black people, transgender persons as well as engagement with hateful content on Twitter has increased sharply since Elon Musk took over the platform, a research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found on Friday. The research findings are now being seen in the background of Twitter's increased reliance on automated moderation instead of human intervention against hate speech on the platform.

The findings stand in contrast to Musk's claims last week that “hate speech impressions” on Twitter were down by one-third since he took the helm of the company. Musk, however, in a tweet on Saturday said that the findings are “utterly false” while responding to a New York Times story on the study.

Engagement with hateful content up by 372 per cent

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In mid-November, Elon Musk had said that hateful tweets would be “max deboosted & demonetized”, following which, the Twitter users wouldn’t see the content unless they search for it on the platform.

But the research found that engagement with hate speech has increased to indiscriminate levels since Musk took over the company. The average number of likes, replies, and retweets on posts with slurs was 13.3 during the weeks before Musk's takeover of the platform.

Following Musk'stakeover, the average engagements on hateful content have jumped to 49.5 — a whopping increase by 372 per cent — according to the report.

Worryingjump in hate speech against Black people

Before Elon Musk took over the platform, an average of 1,282 tweets with slursagainst Black people appeared on a daily basis on Twitter. After Musk formally became Twitter's owner, this number jumped to 3,876 tweets. But last week, when Musk claimed that hate speech impressions were down by a third, the tweets with slurs against Black people went up even further to 4,650 tweets, the report said.

Hate speech against transgender people up by 62 per cent

The report found that slurs against transgender people — with 5,117 tweets at an average — increased by 62 per cent since Musk took over Twitter.

The data was reportedly gathered using Brandwatch, a social media analytics tool, and included tweets from around the world in English.

Why exactly Hate speech surging on Twitter?

Twitter vice president of Trust and Safety Product Ella Irwin told Reuters that the platform is doing away with certain manual reviews rather than removing certain speech outright. The platform is now relying heavily on automation to moderate content.

She said that Musk was focused on using automation more, arguing that the company had in the past erred on the side of using time and labuor-intensive human reviews of harmful content.

"He has encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe," Irwin said.

Since taking over Twitter in late October, Elon Musk’s act of erratic firings of existing staff (by over fifty per cent) have reportedly gutted the trust and safety teams responsible for moderation, despite the continued concerns from civil rights groups over how hateful content could flourish on Twitter.

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