One of the more concerning aspects of Twitter 2.0, under the leadership of new Chief Twit Elon Musk, is that the platform is slowly becoming more aligned with his own ideology, and his personal thinking on various fronts. For example, just this week, Musk was promoting government-funded media labels to various accounts, which is unevenly applied and mostly to outlets that Musk himself dislikes. On top of other things, Elon had no qualms about removing the blue checkmark from the New York Times’s account, which he regularly criticizes.

Minority Lose Again

Let’s skip to the juice – today, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has highlighted that Twitter recently removed transgender-specific protection from its Hateful Conduct Policy. According to GLAAD’s research, the sentence referring to targeted misgendering and deadnaming was present on April 7th but was stricken from the policy the following day, which happens to be the same day that Twitter announced an update to its Abuse and Harassment Policy.

The removal isn’t too surprising. Musk has Tweeted (at various times) about his opposition to using gender-specific pronouns, along with other transphobic perspectives. As a father himself to a trans child, Musk sees this as an expansion of what he calls ‘The Woke Mind Virus’, which is part of what drove his decision to purchase Twitter in the first place, as a means to ensure that progressive views don’t drown out traditionalism and what he sees as how things should be.

And you’d wish that Musk’s ideologies ended there – the man’s also developing his own generative AI system, which he is now calling ‘TruthGPT’, due to concerns that ChatGPT and other generative tools, censor conservative viewpoints. Last month, reports emerged that Musk was looking to recruit AI developers to build his own, ‘anti-woke’ AI model, amid the rising discussions about the limitations and restrictions of ChatGPT. Musk later confirmed this in an interview with Fox News this week.

Musk has also repeatedly shared his conspiratorial views on the origins of COVID-19 and his opposition to the handling of the crisis. Essentially, Musk’s personal stances are increasingly becoming Twitter’s approach, which has seen the app shift more into line with conservative talking points and allow certain elements of discussion to go unchecked, despite the potential harm that could be caused by such.

Some will see it as a good thing. Musk himself labeled Twitter as being a ‘glorified activist organization’ with regards to how it policed speech. For others, however, reducing safeguards around these elements does pose a serious and unacceptable risk, which would make Twitter more of a home for conspiracies, misinformation, and hate speech. Twitter itself says that hate speech is actually down since Musk took over, while the app is also tackling CSAM content and other elements ignored by past Twitter management. Meanwhile, external reports suggest the opposite is happening.

The Wrap

It’s hard to know exactly what is going on since Musk himself has made it increasingly difficult to get in touch with any Twitter staff, along with access to its internal records. Hate speech, for example, as revealed by external analysis, rose and then decreased after Musk took over. Regardless, instances of hateful terms have, on average, become more common than they were in times past.

Twitter attributes this to the way they measured hate speech (via contextless keyword counting). This makes sense, and it would indeed be difficult to gauge what ‘hateful’ terms could be, given the predominantly subjective nature of conversations. More alarming – Twitter 2.0 seems to be gradually sliding more into line with what Musk thinks is acceptable, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Here’s the key question now: What do advertisers say to all of this? Musk may not give a hoot about what they think, but he should give a hoot about what they represent for the company.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3GW3yyw