Twitter is battling a surge in hateful tweets after Elon Musk formally acquired the company. Yoel Roth, head of the platform’s security and integrity, announced that he has seen an organized effort to spread hate speech on the platform and has started to take measures against it.
According to Roth, “few” accounts have posted a series of tweets in the past two days containing “slanders and other derogatory terms” to get users to consider Twitter’s content-related policies. Roth says that 300 accounts have sent more than 50,000 tweets using a specific smear method, and that almost all of the accounts in question are fake.
Although Musk states that Twitter has not made any changes to its policies yet, some users have the impression that the platform’s content moderation rules will become more flexible with Musk in charge. The famous billionaire previously introduced himself as a “free speech advocate” and said he wanted to make Twitter a “free speech platform”. This has raised concerns about how Twitter plans to handle the hate speech and misinformation that some users have already started to spread in an attempt to test the limits of the platform’s rules.
Musk said on Friday that he plans to set up a “content moderation council” made up of members with a wide variety of perspectives to decide whether to remove a particular post or reinstate a user’s account. He also sent a tweet to the advertisers concerned, stating that he would not allow Twitter to become “an environment where anything can be done freely”. General Motors had halted its ad campaigns on Twitter, voicing concerns about the direction the platform was taking.
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