Even if you didn’t see among these posts, you might wager that somebody you were following had. (And some confessed to looking for despiteful material, believing it would exist, in order to call it out.)
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, tweeted Oct. 29, “Our Rules prohibit Hateful Conduct. This includes targeting people with dehumanizing content and slurs. This DOESN’T mean we have a list of words that are always banned. Context matters. For example, our policies are written to protect reclaimed speech.”
He associated the spike in slurs and other hate speech to a collective trolling effort, tweeting that more than 50,000 of the offending posts originated from just 300 accounts. “Nearly all of these accounts are inauthentic,” Roth wrote “We’ve taken action to ban the users involved in this trolling campaign—and are going to continue working to address this in the days to come to make Twitter safe and welcoming for everyone.”
Musk likewise tweeted, “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” He added, “To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies.”
