Twitter Says Increase in Slurs Following Elon Musk Takeover Is a “Trolling Campaign”

Twitter’s head of safety and integrity says the platform is facing a “trolling campaign” of racist abuse after a report found that the use of the n-word jumped on the social media site less than a day after Elon Musk’s takeover. In a thread on Saturday, Twitter’s Yoel Roth explained that the platform’s policies around hateful conduct on the platform have not shifted since Musk officially took over on Friday despite reports of increasing use of slurs and targeted harassment. “Hateful conduct has no place here. And we’re taking steps to put a stop to an organized effort to make people think we have,” Twitter’s head of safety and integrity tweeted. While Roth confirmed that in the last two days Twitter has seen an uptick in hateful conduct from users, he attributed what’s happening to “a small number of accounts” that have posted “a ton of Tweets that include slurs and other derogatory terms.” Offering up an example, he wrote that “more than 50,000 Tweets repeatedly” using a specific slur “came from just 300 accounts.” He did not clarify which slur he was referring to. One report, from the Network Contagion Research Institute — a group dedicated to monitoring and reporting…
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