Twitter is still at the beginning of its Elon Musk era, but the company’s new owner has not hesitated to leave his mark on the social network.
according to a new survey from GLAAD, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Campaign, prominent LGBTQ accounts are already noticing a difference on the platform under Musk’s leadership.
Of the 11 LGBGT organizations surveyed, five reported experiencing more frequent hate speech and abuse following Musk’s inauguration in late October. Neither group saw a decrease in targeted hate over the same time period.
When asked if their organization had encountered a similar increase in hate on other social networks, 90% of respondents said the increase in harassment was limited to Twitter. All organizations reported finding hate speech and harassment on Twitter, whether in the pre- or post-Musk era.
The survey, which focused on accounts with more than 10,000 followers, is far from exhaustive, but it was designed to capture a “snapshot” of the social media landscape in the first few months after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. After buying Twitter, Musk quickly reversed many of the company’s content moderation decisions, including some high-profile cases that set an ominous precedent for the platform’s many LGBTQ users.
In November, Twitter reinstated right-wing academic Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee, two accounts originally suspended for transphobic tweets about transgender actor Elliot Page and US health official Rachel Levine, respectively. Musk had previously characterized Peterson’s infraction as “minor and borderline,” indicating his interest in overturning the LGBTQ-related suspensions.
A GLAAD and Media Matters report published in December scoured a handful of popular right-wing Twitter accounts and found a post-Musk rise in use of the word “barber,” an increasingly frequent slur that labels queer people as pedophiles. Before Musk relaxed the platform’s rules on hate, Twitter classified the term as a banned anti-LGBTQ slur.
In December, Musk himself baselessly suggested that Yoel Roth, the respected former director of Trust and Safety at Twitter, was a pedophile, sparking a storm of anti-LGBTQ bullying that eventually banned the former gay Twitter exec from his Area of Account. Bay. home.
“…This lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and anti-Semitic threats, of which very little has been removed by Twitter… [and] I finally had to leave my house and sell it,” Roth told Congress earlier this week.
“Those are the consequences of this type of speech and harassment online.”