Australian authorities have contacted Twitter, the social media service owned by Elon Musk, to provide information on its efforts to prevent online hatred.
About one-third of the complaints about online hate that Australia’s Julie Inman Grant’s eSafety Commissioner’s office received concerned Twitter content, she claimed, highlighting a rise in obnoxious tweets after the Tesla CEO acquired the social media site last year.
Regarding posts that are hurtful to Indigenous Australians, LGBTIQ+ people, and anti-Semitic, Inman Grant highlighted her particular concern. The “please explain” notice has a 28-day deadline for Twitter to respond, failing which the company will be subject to a penalty of approximately $700,000 per day.
According to research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Twitter has consistently failed to take action on damaging information uploaded via Twitter Blue accounts, the platform’s subscription service.
She stated,”Any long-time Twitter user has seen since Elon Musk took over the company in October of last year that their feed looks a lot different, looks a lot more toxic. There have been a range of changes that have caused us great concern about the current state of the platform. But the most important piece of evidence we have is that we have received more complaints about online hate on Twitter in the past 12 months than on any other platform, and we want to know how they’re enforcing their own terms of service on the issue.”
Inman Grant criticized Elon Musk’s decision to restore over 62,000 suspended or banned accounts, stating that it was exacerbating the issue of online hate, particularly towards marginalized communities, and that enabling such abuse actually suppresses freedom of expression. She said, “These aren’t just garden-variety Twitter account holders — we’ve got Andrew Tate back on there.”
“A leopard doesn’t change its spots. The general amnesty that Musk announced in November is more akin to breaking serial offenders out of Twitter jail, and he did so in the name of free expression.But what we see every day is when targeted online abuse, particularly towards marginalized communities, is enabled and is not enforced, it actually suppresses freedom of expression.”
Under Australian law, the eSafety Commissioner has the authority to request information about a company’s internal policies and procedures; Inman Grant suggested that Twitter’s significant reduction in staff, from 8,000 to about 1,500, was a contributing factor to the decline in standards on the platform.
With Twitter’s substantial staff cuts, Inman Grant argued that it is impossible to effectively combat online hate and toxicity if a company drastically cuts its trust and safety staff. She emphasized the significance of safety by design and asserted that such measures are fundamental expectations for multi-million or billion-dollar companies with international users.
Since Mr. Musk took over the company, Twitter doesn’t seem to have a media contact.
An automated answer with the smiling poo emoji was sent to the ABC when it sought to contact Twitter using a previous media email address.
Similar warnings were sent to Twitter and other social media platforms earlier this year by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, asking for information about their initiatives to prevent child sexual abuse content on their networks.
