Even if you didn’t see one of these posts, you could bet that someone you were following had. (And some admitted to searching for hateful content, suspecting it would be there, in order to call it out.)
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, tweeted Oct. 29, “Our Rules prohibit Hateful Conduct. This includes targeting people with dehumanizing content and slurs. This DOESN’T mean we have a list of words that are always banned. Context matters. For example, our policies are written to protect reclaimed speech.”
He attributed the spike in slurs and other hate speech to a concerted trolling effort, tweeting that more than 50,000 of the offensive posts came from only 300 accounts. “Nearly all of these accounts are inauthentic,” Roth wrote. “We’ve taken action to ban the users involved in this trolling campaign—and are going to continue working to address this in the days to come to make Twitter safe and welcoming for everyone.”
Musk also tweeted, “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” He added, “To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies.”
