I’ve been saying for a while that Twitter is a toxic swamp of racism and hate. And here’s another example of that brought to you by The Guardian:
Twitter faces a landmark legal challenge after the social media giant failed to remove a series of hate-filled tweets reported by users in what could be a turning point in establishing new standards of scrutiny regarding online antisemitism.
The California-based company, owned since last year by Elon Musk, was alerted to six antisemitic or otherwise racist tweets in January this year by researchers at HateAid, a German organisation that campaigns for human rights in the digital space, and the European Union of Jewish Students EUJS but did not remove them from its platform despite the tweets apparently clearly contravening its own moderation policy.
Four of the tweets denied the Holocaust in explicit terms, one said “blacks should be gassed and sent with space x to Mars”, while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programmes to mass extermination in Nazi death camps. All were reported in January but Twitter ruled that three of the tweets did not violate its guidelines and failed to respond to the other reports, the legal action claims.
HateAid and the EUJS applied earlier this year to a Berlin court to have the tweets deleted, arguing the tweets broke German law and that Twitter had failed to meet contractual obligations to provide a secure and safe environment for its users.
Twitter has received notice of the legal action and has since acted to block some of the offending tweets.
So let’s get this straight:
- Hate speech that violates Twitter’s own guidelines was found on the platform.
- When this was brought to their attention the didn’t remove the Tweets in question.
- Two organization went to court about this.
- The Tweets were instantly removed after the legal action was started.
On the surface, it sounds like Elon Musk and those who work for him feel that hate speech is fine on Twitter unless someone sues Twitter. In which case it then becomes a problem. That’s a really a bad look for Twitter. Especially seeing as Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has called for “hand to hand combat” to get advertisers back onto the platform. Frankly, what advertiser on Earth is going want to be associated with a cesspool of hate which is what Twitter is at present? Stories like this should make advertisers, not to mention Twitter users run in the other direction.