Daniel Hickey, a visiting scholar at the USC Institute for Information Sciences and co-author of the paper, says Twitter’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess whether there have simply been more hate speech on the platform, or if the company has made substantial changes to its policies. after Musk’s takeover. “It’s often quite difficult to sort out because Twitter won’t be completely transparent about this sort of thing,” he says.
This lack of transparency risks getting worse. Twitter announced in February that it would no longer allow free access to its AP, the tool that allows academics and researchers to upload and interact with data from the platform. “For researchers who want to take a broader view of the evolution of hate speech, given that Elon Musk has been running the company for longer and longer, it’s certainly much more difficult now,” says Hickey.
In the months following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, major public media outlets like National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Company and other public media outlets left the platform after being labeled “state-sponsored”, a designation that was once only used for Russian media. , Chinese and Iranian state media. Yesterday, Musk reportedly threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account.
Meanwhile, state-sponsored media appears to be thriving on Twitter. An April report from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that after Twitter stopped removing these accounts, they gained tens of thousands of new followers.
In December, previously banned accounts were allowed back on the platform, including right-wing academic Jordan Peterson and prominent misogynist Andrew Tate, who was later arrested in Romania on human trafficking charges. Liz Crokin, a supporter of the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, was also reinstated under Musk’s leadership. On March 16Crokin alleged – falsely – in a tweet that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel featured a pedophile symbol in a sketch on his show.
Recent changes to Twitter’s verification system, Twitter Blue, where users can pay to get blue checkmarks and greater visibility on the platform, have also contributed to the chaos. In November, a tweet from a fake account posing as giant Eli Lilly announced that insulin was free. The tweet caused the company’s shares to fall nearly 5 percent. But Ahmed says the implications for pay-to-play verification are far more serious.
“Our analysis showed that Twitter Blue was being used as a weapon, particularly by people spreading disinformation,” explains CCDH’s Ahmed. “Scientists and journalists find themselves in an incredibly hostile environment in which their information does not reach the reach enjoyed by bad actors who spread misinformation and hate.”
Despite protests from Twitter, Ahmed says, the study validates what many civil society organizations have been saying for months. “Twitter’s strategy in response to all this massive data from different organizations showing that things were getting worse was to put pressure on us and say, ‘No, we have data that shows the opposite.'”
