Slurs against Black, transgender people have been on the rise on Twitter since Elon Musk took over

The Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Defamation League has found that the volume of hate speech have increased on Twitter ever since Musk became the new heir of the company.

Ankita Chakravarti

By Ankita Chakravarti: Twitter has become a cesspool of hate speech ever since Elon Musk took over the company. Although Musk claimed that “hate speech impressions” have gone down by one-third since his takeover, researchers tell a different story. The slurs against black and transgender people particularly have been on the rise.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Defamation League has found that the volume of hate speech have increased on Twitter ever since Musk became the new heir of the company. The report further revealed that slurs against gay men and transgender people are up 58 per cent and 62 per cent, respectively.

Imrad Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told CNN that Musk had “sent up the batsignal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business, and they have react accordingly.”

“A safe space for hate is a hostile environment to most decent folks,” Ahmed added, “by means of comparison, who would want to sit in a cafe or pub where crazies are screaming expletives and bigotry, let alone have the chutzpah to claim that it was democratically-essential debate?”. Both the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League hinted at “troubling” times ahead if hate speech continues to flourish on the platform.

Earlier in a tweet, Musk said hateful tweets would be debooted & demonetized.“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet,” he said. Musk also mentioned that only the individual tweet will be shadowed and the not the entire account.

On a related note, Elon Musk had announced that Twitter will manually allot different Blue, Grey and Gold check marks to organizations, governments and Twitter Blue subscribers. The decision to allot different colors to different accounts has been taken to resolve the impersonation issue that had cropped up after the initial roll out of the verification program. Several users, who bought the subscription plan, impersonated famous personalities to mislead people. The feature was rolled back soon after.

Courtesy : India Today

Note: This news piece was originally published in indiatoday.com and used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights .