A nonprofit organization that researches links between social media, hate and extremism has been threatened with a lawsuit by X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
– Musk Tweeted that after getting criticized for censoring Twitter in Turkey and India. So apparently if North Korea allowed Twitter, he’d happily censor away since that would be the law.
The good ol “Everything I say has super smart and deep meaning that needs to be explained everytime I make seemingly absurd, contradictory and short-sighted comments.” What a deep, mysterious and nuanced fellow.
When he was just running Tesla and SpaceX, and generally keeping his mouth shut he seemed okay. It was around Hyperloop that he started to show his true self.
The thing that most stands out to me about Musk and his ilk isn't their hate - it's their cowardice.
If they would actually own their hate, I'd have some bare modicum of respect for them. At least then it would be a principled stance. A loathsome one to be sure, but at least principled.
But they're too cowardly and weak-willed for that. They're all telling it like it is and going their own way and fuck your feelings right up until someone calls them out on it, then they instantly turn into weepy schoolgirls moaning about how picked on and persecuted they are.
It’s projection. They shout about ‘snowflakes’ and ‘freedom of speech’. Or screech about ‘wokeness’ and all the other nonsense.
It’s only to deflect from the fact that they’re the snowflakes.
Most of them are too stupid to realise that’s what they’re doing. They’re too embarrassed to admit (often to even themselves) that they have no idea what freedom of speech actually is, or indeed any of the things are that they whine incessantly about. Utterly drowning in their cognitive dissonance.
They get whipped up into such a feverous stupour of fear that they can’t take a second to stop and actually think about what they’re being fed by their media rag of choice. They might actually realise that their stance doesn’t actually make any sense.
From Climate Change to Brexit. From Hunter Biden to Electric Vehicles. From ‘15minute cities’ to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Someone level headed will make a comment or raise an issue of ‘hey guys, maybe we should think about doing something about x. If we don’t then it’s probable that it will lead to something bad’. Something even as simple as offering a policy that will actually improve a great deal of people’s quality of life (including their own) with little cost. It’s all met with ruddy faced rage and flying spittle.
Elon Musk’s slow transformation into Donald Trump is as disturbing as it is fascinating. Not much good at anything, but incredible at self-promotion so people think he is; obsessed with Twitter and conspiracy theories, then becoming a right-wing demagogue; refusing to pay people he owes and suing anyone who looks sideways at him. Few would have predicted this 10 years ago.
In the letter, attorney [for Twitter] Alex Spiro questioned the expertise of the researchers and accused the center of trying to harm X’s reputation. The letter also suggested, without evidence, that the center received funds from some of X’s competitors
Remember that in the legal process, discovery uncovers all truths and communications. Depositions are the one sand trap for people like Trump and Musk. If you lie under deposition, you get prison time. That’s why they rarely if ever agree to it.
I’ll bet a lot of money no suit is filed. This is all posturing for crazies to assume X sued them and it must not be true. Threatening to sue is the new spin doctoring.
Looking over their concerns, I’m not sure that they have a leg to stand on. The claim they’re making is that they’ve measured an increase in hate-related tweets (I’ll take them at their word on this) and then they associate this with Musk taking over.
They present no evidence for this later claim and do not, as far as I can see, make any attempt to compare against increases in hate among other social media platforms.
Grooming, for example, is one topic they covered. But this is a topic that Republicans have been pushing increasingly as election season spins up. Musk didn’t cause that, and that kind of nonsense can be found on Facebook and reddit as well.
I’m inclined to sympathize with an underdog nonprofit, but in this case I just can’t see why they expected not to get pushback on such poorly grounded claims
Once upon a time he did seem to be okay (as far as billionaires can be).
Musk almost seemed philanthropic with his ventures of bringing forward the future with SpaceX and Tesla. Then almost suddenly he started to be vocal about certain politics and various bad practices came to light in how he behaved or treat his workforce.
In fact, it’s only until relatively recently it seems where the ultra wealthy seemed to be quite under the radar. Bezos, for example. Before and during his divorce you never really heard much about him. He seemed pretty likable in many ways. Then suddenly that changed, the media perception shifted and these people started getting lots of publicity and they were clearly unable to curate their image any longer.
A legal system that cannot penalize its abuse by people with money is vulnerable to people like him, and worse yet when whatever penalties that can be applied are not adjusted to the net worth of the person or business it is applied to.
Literally page 1 there says all you need to know about what this “research” was out to prove. The very first line:
Tweets mentioning the hateful ‘grooming’ narrative have jumped 119% under Musk
They’re declaring that the word “grooming” is “hate speech”. It’s not.
More just on page 1:
In 2022 before Musk took over, there were an average of 3,011 such tweets per day. This jumped 119% to 6,596 in the four months after his takeover. Note that this analysis captures the volume of discourse around the ‘groomer’ narrative, which includes tweets defending the LGBTQ+ community as well as those leveling the slurs.
So they’re saying that the overall discourse including those defending against the “slurs” is what has increased, not just actual “hate speech”.
Still on page 1:
In particular, they spiked around the following events:
Ah, so they spiked because of events happening in the world that talk about the thing that is being discussed. Who would have guessed? It’s almost like things that are currently happening get discussed on social media.
On page 3 they then go on to this:
Just five Twitter accounts driving the ‘grooming’ narrative generate up to $6.4m per year for Twitter in ad revenue
So as I suggested, they’ve cherry picked specific accounts with high engagement and use of terms that they decided are hate speech and are using those to show how bad twitter is for hate speech lol.
Sorry but this “research” is ridiculous. It’s the very definition of having a conclusion you want and then working backwards to try and confirm it no matter how.
The irony is that you misread the article, quoted parts while still misreading the article, allowing everyone to see that you misread the article
Then made an argument that only works provided nobody else noticed you misread the article
Which would be a form of cherrypicking.
Because you have stepped over that it's "Grooming Narrative" and not "Grooming" every single post since that one. The conversation is the hate speech, not the specific word.
I didn’t misread the article though, so your entire premise falls apart.
The conversation is the hate speech, not the specific word.
Like I said, they didn’t check “the narrative”. They did searches finding combinations of words. To this study, a tweet saying “LGBT people stand against grooming kids!” would count as a “hate speech” post 🤣. If 100 people retweeted that, it counts as 101 “hate speech” occurrences.
2023 if it worked: |Outrage regarding grooming| |TRG|
2023 as it is now: |Outrage regarding grooming| | T R O L L I N G R E G A R D I N G G R O O M I N G|
To add to it, they show examples that show that not only are there still bad actors on the site, but they're fairly popular and getting featured advertisement. So it would be hard to argue that the increase had nothing to do with them.
There are multiple links in that article. Among them,
Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the number of tweets containing one of several different racial slurs soared in the week after Musk bought Twitter.
A racial epithet used to attack Black people was found more than 26,000 times, three times the average for 2022. Use of a slur that targets trans people increased 53%, while instances of an offensive term for homosexual men went up 39% over the yearly average.
The one Musk cited, the platform's failure to remove hate speech that's pretty infamous at this point, focuses on paying users who break company policy only to have their content boosted instead of removed. While I think it's a small test, it's been a widely known failing for years that's not only increased noticeably under his ownership but is being exacerbated by Blue.
Anyone with time on their hands can verify how little Twitter cares about abusive content. Musk himself has been given the opportunity to rectify this now that it's been called to his attention, as the companies they criticize usually do.
Instead of doing anything useful to retain users and advertisers, he's throwing a tantrum about it that should go directly against his own views on free speech and the free market.
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