News JVTech Hate speech on Twitter: Elon Musk promises “significant reinforcement of moderation”
Published on 05/12/2022 at 16:45
Since the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the question of the moderation of publications on the social network has been on everyone’s lips. Faced with the fears of users, but also in the face of warnings from the regulatory authorities of many countries, the new boss of the platform was forced to communicate on the subject.
We are not going to repeat once again the history of the last few weeks, which have been hectic at Twitter. Since the takeover of the social network by billionaire Elon Musk at the end of October, thousands of company employees have been laid off, including a good part of the content moderation teams. Faced with concerns related to this situation, the new boss of Twitter reacted quickly in early November, explaining, in a tweet, that “Twitter’s commitment to content moderation had absolutely not changed”.
Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.
In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
In France, Twitter worries Arcom
Elon Musk’s communication tends to go all over the place, his reassuring tweets don’t always have the desired effect. Especially when the words are not always accompanied by concrete actions. end of november, Arcom, the French organization in charge of regulating the media, asked Twitter to clarify how the platform intended to control online content, particularly with regard to misinformation and hate speech. As an answer, Twitter returned an almost white copy to the Arcom.
Faced with “very relative transparency concerning the encrypted data” and “imprecise elements” concerning its moderation procedures, Arcom explained, last week, its desire “to enter into dialogue” with Twitter to clarify the situation. . On December 3, it was finally President Emmanuel Macron himself who went to meet Elon Musk with whom he had “a clear and sincere discussion”, in his own words. “Transparent terms of use, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of expression: Twitter must make the effort to comply with European regulations”, declared the French President of the Republic in particular.
We will work with Twitter to improve the protection of children online. Elon Musk confirmed it to me today. Let’s better protect our children online! https://t.co/G31YgUFV6c
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 3, 2022
Moderation on Twitter still present, but less “human”
Moderating more and more with fewer staff would therefore be Elon Musk’s objective. To do this, the boss of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink would like to promote an algorithmic approach to moderation on Twitter. This is the Reuters agency which reveals this information, based on the testimony of Ella Irwin, vice president of trust and security products at Twitter.
The idea would be to speed up the management of problematic content by identifying it automatically, instead of relying on the user reporting system, which requires time-consuming manual verification.
“The biggest recent change is that the moderation team is fully empowered to act quickly and be as aggressive as necessary,” said Ella Irwin, a newcomer to the company. Hashtags, in particular, are now quicker to be filtered.
Twitter and moderation, a thorny subject
Among Twitter’s self-proclaimed fights are protecting children and stalking hate speech. However, one important point should be emphasized: Elon Musk doesn’t necessarily want problematic posts deleted. The boss of Twitter wishes above all to greatly reduce the impact, by limiting the “printing” of the tweets in question.
It’s a shade of size and it’s important to understanding how Elon Musk communicates Twitter’s “moderation success.” In one of his December 2 tweets, he said that “Hate speech impression (the number of times the tweet was viewed) continues to decline” on the social network. This means that it is not a question here of deleting the messages, but of preventing them from being displayed by a maximum of users. “Freedom of expression does not mean freedom of access. Negativity should and will have less reach than positivity,” adds the company’s CEO.
Hate speech impressions (# of times tweet was viewed) continue to decline, despite significant user growth!@TwitterSafety will publish data weekly.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity. pic.twitter.com/36zl29rCSM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022
The concern is that even though, according to Elon Musk, the impression of hate tweets is down, the publication of hate speech is, meanwhile, on the rise. On December 4, the European Commission estimated that “Only 64% of reports of hate messages are now processed within 24 hours by platforms that have signed the EU Code of Conduct. This rate was over 90% in 2020.” And Twitter is singled out as a very bad student.
It will therefore Twitter needs to be more persuasive than that to show its good will in the management of problematic messages on its platform. For that, it will clearly be necessary for Elon Musk to publish a little more than one graph each week.
