The Center for Countering Digital Hate claims in a report that contrary to Elon Musk’s claims hate speech on Twitter is on the rise.
Elon Musk claimed last week that the level of hate content on Twitter has dropped by a third compared to the first day he took ownership of the company. But now an independent research report claims that hate speech on this social network has been increasing since Musk’s arrival.
According to the Verge, the UK’s Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) says that before Elon Musk joined Twitter, there were an average of 1,282 tweets about black people per day, but this figure has now reached 3,876 tweets. In the same week that Musk claimed to have reduced hate speech, the average even reached 4,650 tweets per day, the center says.
Disgusting expressions against transgender people increased by 62% and reached 5117 daily tweets. This information was collected with the help of the Brandwatch tool, which is a tool for analyzing social networks and includes various tweets from all over the English Twitter world.
Engagement with hateful content on Twitter has increased
Elon Musk said in mid-November that hateful tweets would be handled in such a way that almost no one would see them unless they were specifically looking for such content. However, the CCDH report says that even if the number of views of these tweets is down, engagement with them is up.
The average number of likes, replies, and retweets for these posts was already 13.3. But since the beginning of Elon Musk’s management, this figure has reached 49.5. The CEO of CCDH says that Elon Musk implicitly told all the publishers of hateful content that they can return to this social network, and they accepted his offer.
However, Elon Musk misread this report. He promised to publish Twitter statistics on a weekly basis and claimed that the number of views of hateful content is still on a downward trend. It should be mentioned that in recent weeks, Musk has re-enabled the access of many suspended accounts to this social network.
