X, the social media company led by Elon Musk, is under fire once again. New research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship nonprofit, states that the presence of “hate speech” is seemingly unchecked and proliferating on the popular messaging platform once known as Twitter, despite being reported.
A little over a month ago, X ignited a legal battle with the CCDH, accusing it of unlawfully scraping data and selectively picking posts to allege a rise in hate speech.
However, for this report, the CCDH says it did not rely on data scraping tools but claimed to have done a simple surface-level investigation.
CCDH gathered 300 posts from 100 different accounts that contained allegedly hate-fueled content, including slurs, derogatory remarks, and antisemitic content, represented by roughly 140 of the collected posts.
A follow-up a week after these posts were reported revealed that 41 of them were removed by X, leaving the bulk of the disturbing content still accessible.
According to the report, prominent businesses, including Apple and Disney, inadvertently ran online ads on X, positioned close to allegedly hate-ridden posts.
Imran Ahmed, CCDH CEO, critiqued the platform’s response, arguing its inability to adequately address the issue evades any excuses relating to content detection as the CCDH already identified violating posts for them. Meanwhile, X did not directly respond but, in a post, alleged the CCDH made false claims of non-action on violative posts.
“While we wish the CCDH would have sent us the full report for a fair review, the choice was made to share their purported findings with journalists,” X wrote, in a statement about the report. “Our hope is that in the future the CCDH will share the full report with us proactively and prioritize partnership over publicity.
“Based on the limited information we’ve seen, the CCDH is asserting two false claims – that X did not take action on violative posts and that violative posts reached a lot of people on our platform. Firstly, from what was shared with us, we did enforce the posts that violated our policies. Second, the CCDH is misrepresenting how many people have viewed the content, by incorrectly reporting the follower counts of the post authors, rather than reporting the number of people who were exposed to the posts. By not using impression data the CCDH is misleading the public and making unsubstantiated assertions about the user activity on X.”
X took three issues with the CCDH’s report:
- “Each day users share more than ~500 million posts on X. For their recent report, the CCDH selected 300 posts (0.00006% of daily posts) to demonstrate the overall health of the platform. While we know one post can be harmful, we wanted to provide context on the volume.
- “We have investigated and taken action on all posts in the sample that violated our specific rules around Hateful Conduct, Abuse & Harassment, and Violent Speech. These actions include limiting reach, post removal, and account suspension.
- “The recent CCDH report misrepresented the posts’ reach by incorrectly reporting the follower counts of the authors, rather than the publicly-available view count on each post. The posts that violated our rules were each viewed on average 168 times by 84 unique users, which now includes an unfortunate 10% increase in reach due to publishing the report before sharing their findings with us.”
In parallel, Musk has threatened the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) with a defamation lawsuit, blaming their allegedly false accusations of anti-semitism for a precipitous drop in advertising revenue. ADL CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt brushed off Musk’s threats as frivolous while highlighting the billionaire’s engagement with “a highly toxic, antisemitic campaign.”
In response, X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, stated the company’s adamant stance against antisemitism, citing efforts to combat it, including improved enforcement and training for their frontline moderators.
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