A tidal wave of bad news has rained down on Twitter in the U.S. since Elon Musk bought the company in late October. Almost immediately after the acquisition, hate speech spiked on the platform, the company spectacularly botched a new paid verification system, and Musk went to war against major advertisers that had pulled back spending.
But overseas, watchdogs say, the situation is perhaps even more dire.
“There are certain markets that Twitter is operating in that are in open genocide,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, a civil rights organization that advocates against caste systems in South Asia.
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In India, she said, social media has fueled religious and caste-based persecution for years, with extremists using platforms including Twitter to broadcast hate speech and inspire acts of violence. Prior to Musk’s tenure, Twitter had an entire human rights team dedicated to addressing these kinds of dangers, she said.
Now, “there’s like no one in charge. The people we used to email, the emails bounce back.”
In just over a month, Musk has reportedly slashed Twitter’s staff by about two-thirds—from an initial headcount of roughly 7,500—through a series of cullings and by mandating a “hardcore” corporate culture that led hundreds of employees to leave. The entire human rights team has been axed, as have many content moderators crucial to curbing disinformation and dangerous speech.
Global monitors are increasingly worried about the ramifications of those cuts.
“With less teams focused on content moderation, there’s going to be more manipulative or harmful behavior on the platform that goes unnoticed or unchecked,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
The question is whether Musk cares. Historically, Twitter has generated the majority of its revenue in the U.S., according to public filings. When it comes to harmful content overseas, “it’s unclear whether not checking that kind of behavior… is a major business risk,” Brookie said.
Musk and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Even prior to Musk’s ownership, Twitter at times failed to root out toxic messaging. “Their moderation when it came to casteist and religious hate speech, especially dangerous, genocidal speech, was miserable,” Soundararajan said. In India, she noted, “vulnerable caste and religious minorities” have been relentlessly subjected to disinformation campaigns.
But at least the company was making an active effort. Tessa Knight, a research associate specializing in Sub-Saharan Africa at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, said Twitter staffers “actively communicated with the likes of me to try [to] preempt potential problems.” The human rights team sought to identify “dog whistles that people were using in local languages” as slurs and hate speech, she said.
Knight added that Twitter previously worked to address doxxing of activists, refugees, and other at-risk users. Now, her contacts at the company are also gone.
Knight emphasized that Twitter isn’t the dominant social media platform in many sub-Saharan countries, and that content moderation is difficult to implement effectively without also shutting down legitimate advocacy.
Even pre-Musk, she said, Twitter wrestled with how to handle tweets calling for aid to be cut off to Tigray, the northern region in Ethiopia where military activity has “forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes,” according to Human Rights Watch. In effect, Knight said, those tweets are suggesting “everybody in Tigray deserves to starve to death in a famine.”
A recently laid-off Twitter employee explained to The Daily Beast that “it’s difficult to determine what is safe [and] not safe. Those things can be subjective.” Content moderation, he said, introduces risks of bias on the platform—though operating without it is even more perilous. Even Musk has declared that Twitter users don’t have an inherent right to “freedom of reach.” In cases where the company identifies “hate” or “negative” tweets, he said on Nov. 18, those posts will be “max deboosted.”
“You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out,” he continued.
The challenging part is identifying the harmful content to begin with, especially with a skeleton crew. Knight predicted that severely reducing Twitter’s roster of content moderators would “definitely have a really significant impact on the kind of content that finds its way to Twitter.” There are also concerns that loose moderation could spark a “migration” of hateful users to Twitter from larger platforms like Facebook, she said.
“Even in the best of times,” echoed Brookie, “the main challenge here is shortcomings on language ability, and in particular colloquial language ability, which is not a priority for Elon Musk.”
The billionaire—having spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, more than it was worth, by his own admission—has been eager to rapidly overhaul its culture and pace of innovation. One of his most visible early gambits was a plan to foster “citizen journalism” by allowing any user to receive a “verified” badge in exchange for $8 per month.
The plan instantly sparked chaos. Suddenly, there were fake verified clones of O.J. Simpson, Rudy Giuliani, and Musk himself—and a hoax statement supposedly from pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly asserting that “insulin is free now.” (It wasn’t.)
“That was a good example of why Twitter was slow” to implement major software changes prior to Musk, the former employee said. “Anything you do could have a huge impact.”
The fake verified accounts forced Twitter to suspend its verification system, at least temporarily. And while the pranks were largely benign, they demonstrated how easily the platform can be manipulated.
Musk’s supporters have praised his leadership. One prominent conservative user, Liz Wheeler, lauded him for “ridding Twitter of child pornography & child trafficking hashtags,” even as the company has reportedly laid off many staffers responsible for eliminating that kind of material.
As Forbes reported on Wednesday, child sexual abuse material “remains alarmingly easy to find on Twitter.”
Most of the experts who spoke to The Daily Beast acknowledged that it’s still too early to fully analyze the impact of Musk’s policy changes, though the risks are obvious both in the U.S. and abroad.
David Toomey, voting rights and technology fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Twitter has historically failed to fully enforce its own rules around voting disinformation, as one example. “I think the concern now,” he said, “is that it’s going to get worse.” (If it’s any indication, Twitter recently revealed that it will no longer enforce its rules about COVID-19 misinformation.)
There are also hugely important questions about how Musk will engage with foreign governments—particularly those averse to his stated principle of “free speech”—given that Musk’s electric carmaker, Tesla, is working to grow its international footprint.
“Twitter historically has fought back against government demands for censorship or attempts to unmask anonymous users. It’s totally unclear how Musk’s Twitter will handle such requests,” said Evan Greer, director of the advocacy group Fight for the Future.
To Soundararajan, Musk simply doesn’t grasp the global dangers Twitter poses, or his responsibility to address them. “I actually think he lacks cultural competency,” she said, later adding, “There is more to the human species than people who live in North America.”
