Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.
Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.
And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.
These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.
The lack of action extends to new accounts affiliated with terror groups and others that Twitter previously banned. In the first 12 days after Mr. Musk assumed control, 450 accounts associated with ISIS were created, up 69 percent from the previous 12 days, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.
Cool cool, nothing to see here, everything is fine…
And anyone else in a country that hasn’t banned twitter or anyone who has access to a VPN. And it is exactly them talking to themselves that creates the bubbles that end up with insurrections.
Not if they need to switch to VPNs to use it. Seems that would make it much harder.
My WAG is that if the EU wanted to ban Twitter, fines for illegal operation in countries of EU jurisdiction would be the first, easiest, and probably the only necessary recourse. Twitter would then be obligated to self-filter, much the same way that some YouTube videos are sometimes “not available in your country” for copyright reasons. They could also require European ISPs to block Twitter’s IP(s), but that would likely not be necessary. It would also bring howls of “censorship” due to the similarity with what China (and lately Russia) has been doing.
It’s true that VPNs, TOR, and the like could be used to work around a ban, but it would still have the effect of hugely reducing Twitter’s audience reach and therefore influence in a given jurisdiction, and hence also wipe out advertising revenue in that area. No one is going to pay big advertising bucks to reach a few crackpots using VPNs to skirt the law. A ban in the EU could also help incentivize other countries to follow suit.
But it remains to be seen whether Musk is crazy enough to openly defy the EU, although there’s no doubt that he’d love to.
I do sometimes wonder about that. I see ads for things like Nord VPN or the like all the time on youtube channels, and I do wonder if they are actually fronts for government agencies that will do exactly the opposite of what is promised.
I’m generally not that conspiracy minded, but I also don’t know how they can allow VPNs that have “no logs” policies and the like to operate. Seems that’s pretty ripe with potential for criminal activity.
At the same time, that’d be a pretty big conspiracy.
I’m sure this is going to really cause advertisers to come streaming back.
Also, antivaxxers have been responding to pharma ads on Twitter with their crap. I’m sure that’s going to make them super happy.
Quite a few Muskrats are actually upset that he banned Kanye because “all” he did wrong was post a swastika, which isn’t against the law and Musk promised no banning unless it is against the law. But most Muskrats really seem to sincerely believe this is all a cunning plan by Musk.
Twitter had 3,980 advertisers in May, the month after Mr. Musk agreed to buy the company, according to MediaRadar, an advertising intelligence company. By October, it had 2,315 advertisers, the fewest of any month until that point.
And
The company previously forecast that it would generate $1.4 billion in the last three months of the year, down from $1.6 billion a year ago because of the global economic downturn. But as Twitter kept missing its weekly advertising targets, that number slid to $1.3 billion, then to $1.1 billion, two people said.
So that quantified the advertising situation nicely. Pepsi, which had planned to be a big Twitter advertiser during the Super Bowl, not wants terms that lets them withdraw at any time with no penalty.
Elon Musk brought back many right-wing bigots, terrorists, and agents provocateur as part of his general “Vox Populis, Vox Dei” amnesty, and one especially nasty one, @ShuForCongress , said after the Hunter Biden story broke that society can no longer be fixed with ballots, but with bullets. We saw that on the Stupid Republican Idea of the Day thread.
She apparently dirty-deleted it, but I spent about half an hour just now rage-tweeting at her on several of her posts, and they’re all awful, to the point where Twitter briefly blocked me and asked me to confirm my identity. (I don’t get on very much.)
But maybe Elon is hoping the Breitbarts, etc., of the world will start advertising on his platform since he’s certainly collecting their target market into a single consolidated hive of scum and villainy.
You know, 2300 advertisers if less than 4000 advertisers, but it’s still a big number. And $1.1B may be less than forecasts, and less than they got last year. But that’s still a LOT of money. If Musk can maintain that kind of revenue with a tiny fraction of the employees…he may be successful.
Being banned in the EU is a much bigger deal. Does Twitter need the EU? I dunno.
Are there any sites at the level Twitter would need to be that are banned from the EU? Heck, what sites are banned from the EU for reasons other than copyright infringement?
As a European resident, I can confirm that I run into websites all the time that show me nothing but a legal disclaimer, which expresses some version of “in order to serve you this content, we’d need to comply with the GDPR, and lol no we’re not doing that, so buzz off.”
That’s self-restriction, of course, not an imposed ban, but I assume that’s what Twitter would do.