The sudden departure of Twitter executives tasked with content moderation 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 Irwin’s departure, the company’s director of brand safety and advertising quality, AJ Brown, reportedly leftas is Maie Aiyed, a program manager who has worked in brand safety partnerships.

It’s been just over seven months since Elon Musk closed on his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, an investment that has so far been a giant money loser. Musk slashed the company’s workforce and repealed policies that restricted the type of content that could circulate. In response, many brands have suspended or reduced their ad spending, as various 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.

This week, Musk said it’s not against Twitter’s terms of service to confuse trans people on the platform. He said that doing so is simply “rude” but not illegal.” LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers question his position, claiming that he invites harassment of trans people. On Friday, Musk promoted a video on Twitter that these groups considered transphobic.

Many LGBTQ organizations expressed their dismay at nbc news on Musk’s decision, saying the company’s new policies will lead to an increase in anti-trans hate speech and abuse online.

Although Musk recently hired former NBC Universal head of global advertising Linda Yaccarino to succeed him as CEO, it’s unclear how the new boss will allay advertisers’ concerns regarding racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and homophobic content in the open. of Musk’s recent departures and continued role. as majority owner and chief technology officer.

Even before the latest high-profile departures, Musk had been cutting back on security and content moderation workers as part of the company’s widespread layoffs. He removed the entire AI ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring harmful content was not algorithmically recommended to users.

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

Experts and members of the advertising industry told CNBC that there is no evidence to support those claims. Some say that Twitter is actively hindering independent researchers trying to track such metrics.

Twitter did not provide a comment for this story.

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

The authors wrote that the accounts acquaintance for posts containing hateful content and insults directed at blacks, Asians, LGBTQ groups and others increased those tweets “dramatically after Musk’s inauguration” and shows no signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter has made no progress on bots, which have remained as prevalent and active on Twitter as they were before Musk’s tenure.

musk previously indicated that 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 the University of Southern California’s Institute of Information Sciences, told CNBC that the onslaught of hate speech and other explicit content is correlated with fewer people working on issues of trust and security and relaxed content moderation policies.

Musk also told the WSJ event that “most advertisers” had returned to Twitter.

Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said it’s unclear how many advertisers are back in spending, but “many advertisers remain on hiatus as Twitter has limited reach.” compared to other platforms. “

Jones said many advertisers are waiting to see levels of “toxicity” and hate speech on Twitter change as the site appears to lean towards more right-wing users and the US election approaches. He said a big challenge for brands is that Musk and Twitter haven’t made it clear what they count in their metrics that assess hate speech, spam, scams and bots.

The researchers are asking Musk to provide data to back up his recent claims.

“More data is critical to really understand if there is a continued decline in hate speech or bots,” Burghardt said. “That again emphasizes the need for more transparency and for academics to have data freely available.”

The CCDH analyzed a series of tweets from the beginning of 2022 to February 28, 2023. It published a report In March, by analyzing more than 1.7 million tweets collected using a data-collection tool and Twitter’s search function, it found that tweets mentioning the hateful “grooming” narrative have increased 119% since it began. Musk took over.

That refers to “the hateful false lie” that the LGBTQ+ community grooms children. CCHR found that a small number of popular Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers have been pushing the “hate ‘grooming’ narrative online.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, continues to find antisemitic posts on Twitter. The group recently done its 2023 study on digital terrorism and hate on social platforms and rated Twitter a D-, putting it on a 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, asked Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise of hate speech on Twitter. He said that he has not yet received a response.

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

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