Twitter’s Surge in Harmful Content a Barrier to Advertiser Return

Whoa - read the article. This is much worse than what's been commonly reported:

More than 30% of U.S. adults that used Twitter between March and May reported seeing content they consider bad for the world, according to a survey conducted by the USC Marshall Neely Social Media Index. That percentage was higher than rivals Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Many users reported seeing tweets that condoned or glorified violence towards marginalized groups or explicit videos easily accessible to underage children.
Earlier this year, researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found that Twitter failed to take down dozens of images of child sex abuse. The team identified 128 Twitter accounts selling child sex abuse material and 43 instances of known CSAM. “It is very surprising for any known CSAM to publicly appear on major social media platforms,” said lead author and chief technologist David Thiel. Twitter responded to the issue after being contacted by researchers. This year Twitter removed 525% more accounts related to child sexual exploitation content than a year ago, according to the company.
Twitter has been slow to catch and remove some harmful content since Musk fired or faced resignations for nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff, including the bulk of the trust and safety team, which is responsible for managing responses to content reports. On average, only 28% of antisemitic tweets reported by the ADL between December and January were removed or sanctioned. The group found the posts by drawing a 1% sample of all posts from Twitter’s API, or application programming interface. Twitter has since restricted the reported tweets that were found to violate policies, the company said.
"Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we have seen the platform go from having one of the best trust and safety divisions in the industry, to one of the worst,” said Nadim Nashif, director at 7amleh-The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media.
During Musk’s tenure, content from extremist political groups and misinformation related to national politics have increased. QAnon-related hashtags rose 91% in May compared with a year earlier, with the majority of those tweets occurring in the last six months, according to research from the ADL. In the first six months under Musk, nearly a quarter of the top Covid-19 related tweets included information about vaccines that is unproved and untested, according to research done by Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog group funded by donors. In November, Twitter removed bans against Covid-19 misinformation.
The challenge with the freedom of speech, not reach policy is, “there’s no way to verify what’s actually de-amplified,” said Yael Eisenstat, head of the Center for Technology and Society at the ADL. Meanwhile, Musk himself has also engaged with extremist voices, replying to antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-trans narratives, which boosts those posts because he is followed by 148 million people.

So advertisers, remember, if you're paying for ads on twitter, you're directly funding racism, sexism, Qanon, and pedophilia. Yep, that's right - Musk is paying far-right content creators to post on Twitter - so your advertising dollars are going directly to rapists and sex traffickers like Andrew Tate.

This is why I love the fediverse. No advertising at all, I don't scroll to see ads. I scroll Lemmy to see user content and to interact with other users.

There's be an instance with ads eventually. You'll see.
- IIRC the company behind Pixiv made a Mastodon instance and they've been near-universally defederated because of having ads
- What’s the long term plan for server costs? This thing isn’t free
Well that and the distributed governance means that somewhere out there is the right instance for avoiding harmful content for you

It amuses me to leave the image hosted by Twitter.

Edit: it was pointed out that Elon is a creepy stalker even through a static image, so here's a less 1984'd link.

What the hell is in Twitters images? I clicked on it to view the image and my browser immediately gave me its "Parts of the page that track your online activity were blocked" popup

I report inappropriate stuff that I see on twitter. They used to be slow to respond but they eventually did. Now they’ve stopped responding entirely.

Before I left Twitter, I just stopped reporting things when they laid off so much of Trust and Safety, because I knew it would be a waste of my time.

That's a great idea! I'm going to start doing that.

It really isn't wise to throw money into an active dumpster fire.

What I loved was Musk writing some terrible tweets about how Twitter could make more money. Quite a few morons were like: this is how he's a good businessman. Anyone with experience in the industry knew it was tosh.
Glad to see him with the full reigns now and dutifully driving it to the ground.

He's probably doing it on purpose, to kill the worlds largest central connection place for organizing movements, such as BLM and the Arab spring.

Of course it's hard to remove harmful content when you've sacked three quarters of your staff.

It’s been a cesspool for almost a decade. They are just noticing now???

The best analogy I can think of is a swimming pool.
It used to have people to treat the pool, skim it, add new water to replace the water lost from evaporation, regulate the chemicals, and try to keep people from pissing in the pool. It was cheap and half decent so people still wanted to visit.
Since Elon bought it, he's sacked everyone who performed any upkeep to the pool and he's removed the filters. Now the pool smells terrible, the water has changed color, the water level has dropped substantially, animals are living in it, and the pumps that recirculate water are close to failing entirely. He's also built a tall fence around it and raised the price of admission.
It's a total hellhole to the point that the government is close to taking it away and filling it with soil because it's a health hazard.
Well yeah, the cesspool has comparatively become a cesspool. As bad as it was it became so much worse since ElMo took over