Elon Musk Reports Less Hate Content After Changing The Definition Of Hate Content On Twitter

The oldest trick in the book.

On November 23rd, Elon Musk rushed to his twitter to report what he certainly told his engineers to draw up in order to make him look more appealing to advertisers: “twitter’s hate speech impressions are lower than they were before he took over.” There’s just one problem: it’s completely and utterly bogus. One reason why hate impressions are lower than ever? The site has completely changed the way it identifies and classifies hate. A major change in the definition of hate was the removal of transphobia and misgendering from Twitter’s hateful conduct policy. Turns out it’s much easier to see lower amounts of hate content when you literally change the definition of hate content to write out transphobia.

There have been many media watchdogs that have been reporting on the increase in hateful content on Twitter. In the immediate aftermath of the takeover, Musk saw a 500% increase in racial slurs. In a study from Tufts University, when looking at the most popular tweets around LGBQT+ keywords, the number of tweets associated with hate doubled. This has been absolutely obvious to any LGBTQ+ activist on twitter. We have seen “Ok Groomer” start to trend again. We have seen hateful anti-lgbqt+ accounts reinstated such as the Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate. Worse, Elon Musk has announced a general amnesty for suspended accounts which will include genocidalists, doxxers, serial harassers, and more. Recently, an EU watchdog reported that Twitter is currently removing less hate content than any other site - only 45% of hate content gets removed.

It’s also easily disproven that there are only 2.5 million hate impressions per day. Those of us with larger accounts know how much a single tweet with 5k RTs and 25k Likes can get, impressions wise - here is an example of a tweet along with a screenshot of its impressions. This tweet alone by my earned 5 million impressions:

Com[pare this to a random tweet from Libs of TikTok, which was suspended multiple times for hateful conduct before Elon Musk took over and it is absolutely clear how “hate impressions are down” - he refuses to classify a literal tweet 4 hours after the shooting on Colorado targeting other drag events and trans legislators as hate. Here’s an example of one of MANY hateful tweets targeting transgender people for having kids - these far surpass the 2.5m impressions on Musk’s list and would have been targets for removal previously - one of them, Jordan Peterson’s tweet, was even removed as hate speech and brought back by Musk:

This move to redefine what hateful conduct is in order to make Twitter look better is transparent. It’s really easy to see a third drop in hateful conduct when you remove transphobia as hateful conduct. This is particularly insidious in the wake of the Colorado Club Q shooting, in which a transphobic and homophobic shooter was praised by a variety of ultra-right influencers on Twitter. We saw mocking derision and even victim blaming of the LGBTQ+ Club Q victims from accounts like Matt Walsh. We saw Tim Poole say that there will be more shootings until the left stops “grooming events,” which is what he called Club Q’s family friendly drag event on transgender day of remembrance. We saw Libs of TikTok, only hours after the shooting happen, target other transgender legislators in the same state as well as other drag performances.

What has Elon Musk done in response to hate speech? Besides classifying transphobia as no longer hate speech, he has also palled around with all of the hate accounts listed above. He replied to Libs of TikTok in a joking fashion only a day after it came out she targeted other LGBTQ+ events in the same state that the club Q shooting happened in. He made anti-Antifa jokes with Tim Poole in the immediate aftermath of Poole’s hateful anti-LGBTQ+ threats where he said shootings would continue. Elon Musk sees hate speech dwindling on Twitter because he has erased the hate speech that he implicitly agrees with, the elimination of transgender people and stoking of violence against LGBTQ+ populations.

The attempt to say that negative consequences have fallen after new leadership is reminiscent of other draconian right wing rewriting of the statistics. We saw Betsy Devos attempt to change the definition of sexual assault in order to say that sexual assaults had dropped. Let’s not forget all of the ways governors in some states changed how they measure covid in order to get fewer numbers - I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Elon Musk says hate speech is down on twitter because he agrees with the hate speech that he refuses to remove. When the CEO of twitter pals around with nazis and anti-LGBTQ+ leaders on his platform, it’s impossible to take anything he reports on the prevalence of hate speech on the site seriously. It’s worth asking that if he is willing to write out trans people from his definition of hate, who else is he willing to write out?