Elon Musk, Twitter faces brand safety concerns after executives leave

The sudden departure of Twitter executives tasked with overseeing content and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech.

On Thursday, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned from the company. Following the departure of Irwin, the company’s head of brand integrity and ad quality, AJ Brown, It said LeaveSo did Mai Ayed, the program manager who worked on brand safety partnerships.

It’s been just over seven months since Elon Musk closed on the $44 billion Twitter purchase, an investment that has remained so far Giant money loser. Musk has drastically reduced the company’s workforce and rolled back policies that restricted the types of content that could be shared. In response, many brands have suspended or reduced their ad spending, as several civil rights groups have documented.

Twitter, under Musk, is the fourth most hated brand in the US according to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation rankings.

The controversy surrounding Musk’s control of Twitter continues to grow.

Musk said this week that it is not against Twitter’s terms of service to mislead transgender people on the platform. Doing so, he said, is just “rude” but not illegal.” LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers question his stance, claiming he advocates bullying of transgender people. On Friday, Musk encouraged his 141.8 million followers to watch a video, which was posted to Twitter. , and that was considered by these groups to be transphobic.

Many LGBTQ organizations have expressed their discontent NBC News on Musk’s decision, saying the company’s new policies will lead to an uptick in anti-transgender hate speech and abuse online.

Although Musk recently named former NBCUniversal director of global advertising Linda Iaccarino to succeed him as CEO, it’s unclear how the new chairman will ease advertisers’ concerns about racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and LGBT content in light of the recent departures and Musk’s continued role as a majority. Owner and Chief Technology Officer.

Even before his recent high-profile exits, Musk had been cutting back on safety and content moderation mandates as part of company-wide layoffs. It eliminated the entire AI ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring that malicious content was not recommended to users through algorithms.

Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently played down concerns about the spread of hate speech on Twitter. He claimed during a Wall Street Journal event that since he took over the company in October, hate speech on the platform has decreased, and that Twitter has reduced “spam, fraud, and bots” by “at least 90%.”

Advertising industry experts and insiders told CNBC there is no evidence to support the claims. Some say that Twitter is actively blocking independent researchers trying to track such metrics.

Twitter did not provide comment for this story.

in paper published In April, which will be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Web and Social Media in Cyprus, researchers from Oregon State, the University of Southern California and other institutions show that hate speech has increased since Musk bought Twitter.

The authors wrote that accounts a favour As for posts with hateful content and insults targeting black people, Asians, LGTBQ groups, and more, that retweet has increased “significantly after Musk’s takeover” and shows no signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter has not made headway with bots, which remain as prevalent and active on the social media platform as they were before Musk’s tenure.

Musk previously Shown Twitter’s recommendation algorithms show less offensive content to people who don’t want to see it.

Keith Burghardt, one of the paper’s authors and a computer scientist at USC’s Information Science Institute, told CNBC that the flood of hate speech and other explicit content is associated with fewer people working on trust and safety issues and easing content moderation policies.

Musk also said at a Wall Street Journal event that “most advertisers” are back on Twitter.

It’s not clear how many advertisers have resumed spending but “many advertisers are still on pause, as Twitter has limited reach compared to some platforms,” ​​said Lois Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who is now at the Brand Integrity Institute. other.”

Jones said many advertisers are waiting to see how levels of “toxicity” and hate speech change on Twitter as the site appears to lean toward more right-wing users and as US election season approaches. One big challenge for brands, he said, is that Musk and Twitter haven’t made it clear what counts in their metrics for evaluating hate speech, spam, fraud, and bots.

The researchers are calling on the billionaire Twitter user to provide data to back up his latest claims.

“More data is critical to understanding whether there is a sustained decline in hate speech or bots,” Burghardt said. “This underscores once again the need for more transparency and the need for academics to have freely available data.”

Getting that data is getting more and more difficult.

Twitter recently started charging companies for access to its Application Programming Interface (API), which allows them to integrate and analyze Twitter data. The lowest paying tier costs $42,000 for 50 million tweets.

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Digital Hate, said that because researchers now have to “pay a fortune” to access the API, they have to rely on other potential avenues for data.

“Twitter under Elon Musk has been more ambiguous,” Ahmed said.

He added that Twitter’s search function is less effective than it was in the past and that the view count, as seen on certain tweets, can change suddenly, making its use unstable.

“We no longer have any confidence in the accuracy of the data,” Ahmed said.

The Advisory Council for Human Rights analyzed a series of tweets from the beginning of 2022 until February 28, 2023. It was released a report In March, it analyzed more than 1.7 million tweets collected using Twitter’s data scraping tool and search function, and discovered that tweets mentioning a decorating story were up 119% since Musk took over.

This refers to the “lying false and hateful lie” that the LGBTQ+ community is sponsoring children with, according to the report. The CCDH report found that a few popular Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers were driving the hateful “grooming” narrative online. “

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, continues to find anti-Semitic posts on Twitter. group recently go run Its 2023 study of digital terrorism and hate on social platforms rated Twitter a D-, putting it on par with Russia’s VK as the worst in the world for large social networks.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of the global social action agenda at the center, invited Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise in hate speech on Twitter. He said he has not yet received a response.

“They need to look at it seriously,” Cooper said. If they don’t, he said, lawmakers will be called upon to “do something about it.”

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