Twitter is still in the early days of the Elon Musk era, but the company’s new owners have not hesitated to leave their mark on the social network.
Prominent LGBTQ accounts are already noticing platform differences under Musk’s leadership, according to new research from GLAAD, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Campaign.
Five out of 11 LGBGT groups surveyed reported experiencing more frequent abuse and hate speech after Musk was acquired in late October. No group experienced a decrease in targeted hate over the same period.
When asked if their organizations had encountered similar increases in harassment on other social networks, 90% of respondents said the increase in harassment was limited to Twitter. All organizations reported encountering hate speech and harassment on Twitter, both before and after the mask era.
Focusing on accounts with more than 10,000 followers, the study isn’t comprehensive, but it does provide a “snap shot” of the social media landscape in the early months after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. It’s meant to capture the “shot”. After acquiring Twitter, Musk quickly reversed many of the company’s content moderation decisions, including several high-profile cases that set ominous precedents for many of the platform’s LGBTQ users.
In November, Twitter revived right-wing academics Jordan Peterson and Babylon Bee. Two of his accounts had been suspended for transphobic tweets about transgender actor Elliott Page and US health official Rachel Levine. Musk has previously characterized Peterson’s transgressions as “minor and questionable” and expressed interest in rescinding the LGBTQ-related suspension.
A GLAAD and Media Matters report published in December tracked a handful of popular right-wing Twitter accounts and found that use of the word “groomer” surged after the masks. Before Musk relaxed its platform’s rules about hate, Twitter classified the term as a banned anti-LGBTQ slur.
In December, Musk himself made a baseless suggestion that Yoel Roth, the esteemed former head of trust and safety at Twitter, was a pedophile, sparking a storm of anti-LGBTQ harassment and ultimately homosexuality. Former Twitter executive kicked out of Bay Area.
“…this lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and anti-Semitic threats, of which Twitter has removed very little… [and] We ended up having to move out and sell it,” Ross told Congress earlier this week.
“These are the results of this kind of online harassment and speech.”
