Elon Musk, Twitter face brand safety concerns after executives depart

The sudden departure of the top Twitter executive responsible for content moderation and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, resigned from the company on Thursday. Following Irwin’s departure, the company’s head of brand safety and advertising quality, AJ Brown, It is said leftas does Maie Aiyed, program manager for brand safety partnerships.

It’s been just over seven months since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, and the investment so far has been losing giant. Musk has drastically reduced the company’s workforce and rolled back policies that restricted what could be disseminated. In response, many brands have paused or reduced ad spend, as some civil rights groups have documented.

According to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation ranking, Twitter under Musk is the fourth most hated brand in the United States.

The controversy surrounding Musk’s control of Twitter continues.

This week, Musk said sexism against transgender people on the platform does not violate Twitter’s terms of service. He said it was just “rude” but not illegal to do so. LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers have disputed his stance, claiming it invites bullying of trans people. On Friday, Musk promoted a video on Twitter that the groups deemed transphobic.

Many LGBTQ organizations are nbc news Opposed to Musk’s decision, saying the company’s new policy will lead to a rise in anti-transgender hate speech and online abuse.

Although Musk recently hired former NBC Universal global advertising chief Linda Yacarino to succeed him as CEO, given the recent departure and Musk’s continued role, it’s unclear how the new boss will ease advertisers’ concerns about racism, Anti-Semitic, transphobic and homophobic content concerns as major shareholder and tech chief.

Even before the latest high-profile departure, Musk had been reducing the number of employees responsible for security and content moderation as part of widespread layoffs at the company. He disbanded the entire AI ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring that harmful content was not recommended to users through algorithms.

Musk, also CEO tesla and SpaceX, recently downplayed concerns about the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter. He claimed at a Wall Street Journal event that since he took over the company in October, hate speech on the platform has decreased and that Twitter has reduced “spam, scams and bots” by “at least 90%” .

Experts and ad industry insiders told CNBC there is no evidence to support the claims. Some say Twitter is actively hindering independent researchers trying to track such metrics.

Twitter did not comment for this story.

in a paper published The study, which researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Southern California and other institutions will present in April at the upcoming International Conference on Internet and Social Media in Cyprus, shows that hate speech has increased since Musk bought Twitter. increased.

The author writes that the account known For posts containing hateful content and slurs against black people, Asians, LGTBQ groups and others, such tweets “increased dramatically after Musk took over” and showed no signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter hadn’t made progress with bots, which were as popular and active on Twitter as they were before Musk took office.

Musk previously indicated Twitter’s recommendation algorithm shows less objectionable content to people who don’t want to see it.

One of the paper’s authors, Keith Burghardt, a computer scientist at the USC Institute for Information Sciences, told CNBC that the proliferation of hate speech and other explicit content has been linked to fewer staff dealing with trust and safety issues and looser content moderation policies.

Musk also said at the Wall Street Journal event that “most advertisers” have returned to Twitter.

Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive now at the Brand Safety Institute, said it was unclear how many advertisers had resumed spending, but “many advertisers are still on pause because of competition with other Twitter’s reach is limited compared to some platforms.”

Many advertisers are waiting to see how levels of “toxicity” and hate speech change on Twitter, Jones said, as the site appears to be leaning toward more right-wing users and as the U.S. election looms. A big challenge for brands, he said, is that Musk and Twitter have yet to clarify the metrics they use to evaluate hate speech, spam, scams and bots.

The researchers called on Musk to provide data to back up his recent claims.

“More data is critical to really understanding whether hate speech or bots continue to decline,” Burghardt said. “This again underscores the need for greater transparency and access to free data for academia.”

CCDH analyzed a series of tweets from early 2022 to February 28, 2023.it released a report In March, an analysis of more than 1.7 million tweets collected using data scrapers and Twitter’s search function found that mentions of hateful “grooming” narratives had increased 119% since Musk took over.

That refers to the “false and hateful lies” about raising children in the LGBTQ+ community. The CCDH found that a handful of popular Twitter accounts, such as TikTok’s Libs and Gays Against Groomers, have been promoting “hateful ‘grooming’ narratives online”.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights organization, continues to find anti-Semitic posts on Twitter.The group recently implement Its 2023 study on digital terrorism and hate on social platforms rated Twitter a D-, putting it tied with Russia’s VK as the worst of the world’s large social networks.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, vice president of the center and director of the Global Social Action Agenda, called on Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise of hate speech on Twitter. He said he has yet to hear back.

“They need to take it seriously,” Cooper said. If they don’t, lawmakers will be asked to “do something about it,” he said.

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