Racial slurs spike in tweets since Musk hijack: report

Incidents of racial slurs surge twitter ever since Elon Musk The Digital Civil Rights Group reported Thursday that it had bought an influential platform despite assurances that the platform had reduced hateful activity.

researchers in Digital Hate Countermeasure Center It found that the number of tweets containing any of several different racial slurs spiked in the following weeks. Musk buys Twitter.

Racist terms used to attack black people were found more than 26,000 times, three times the 2022 average. The use of slurs targeting transgender people increased by 53%, and instances of offensive terms against gay men increased by 39% over the year. average.

There have also been more instances of offensive language targeting Jews and Hispanics.

Overall, the researchers looked at approximately 80,000 English-language tweets and retweets from around the world that contained one of the offensive terms they searched for.

“This figure comes despite Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, claiming the platform has been successful in reducing the amount of hate speech seen on Twitter’s search and trends pages. It shows a spike in the actual volume of hate tweets, a non-profit organization with offices in the US and UK, according to the Center’s analysis.

On Wednesday, Roth acknowledged the recent rise in hate speech on the site, but said the platform had made great strides in reducing that number.

In a statement broadcast live on Twitter, Roth said, “We stopped the spike in hateful behavior, but the level of hateful behavior on our service is about 95% lower than before the acquisition.” Thanks to the changes and the aggressive enforcement we’ve put in place, Twitter is safer than ever.”

On October 31st, Twitter announced that 1,500 accounts had been removed for posting hate speech. The company also said it has significantly reduced the visibility of posts containing defamation, making them harder to find on its platform.

Mr. Musk tweeted last week that “contrary to what we read in the media, sometimes hate speech is below the previous bar (asterisk).”

Musk He describes himself as a free speech absolutist and is widely expected to overhaul Twitter’s content moderation policy.So far no changes have been made, he said, but Musk made them big layoffs at the company, question one’s ability to crack down on misinformation Especially the days of hate speech ahead of the 2022 election.

Accurately assessing the platform’s performance in the election and determining whether Twitter has adopted a different strategy for content that violates its policies could take some time, according to the Stanford Internet Observatory. said Renee DiResta, research manager at

“Our civil integrity policy has not changed,” DiResta said of the new owner of Twitter. “Now there is a difference between having a policy and enforcing a policy.”

Shortly after Musk acquired Twitter, some users posted hate speech and appeared to test the boundaries of the platform under its new owners.

Within just 12 hours of purchasing Musk References to certain racist language used to insult black people will be finalized, according to an analysis conducted by the Network Infections Institute, a disinformation tracker based in Princeton, New Jersey. Increased by 500%.

Twitter did not immediately respond Thursday to a message seeking comment on the new report’s findings.