EU: Before Elon Musk, Twitter slipped in its efforts to suppress hate speech

• The removal of posts that are prohibited in Europe performed worse this year than it did in 2021, European regulators.
• This year, fewer hate speech postings were removed by Twitter than in 2021 (45.4% vs. 49.8%).
• According to the research, YouTube improved, eliminating 90.4% of reported posts, up from 58.8% a year earlier.

According to a report released by European regulators on Thursday, Twitter and other of its social media rivals were behind in removing abusive remarks that are prohibited there this year.

According to the European Union officials’ study, Twitter erased 45.4% of the hate speech messages it was informed about in a sample this year, down from 49.8% in 2021.

According to the survey, Twitter underperformed on that metric more than any other social media network studied, although some of them, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, also lagged behind in comparison to the prior year.

According to the research, YouTube improved, eliminating 90.4% of reported posts, up from 58.8% a year earlier.

The information was gathered between March and May, months before internet tycoon Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion and started to relax the site’s policies even more regarding nasty posts.

Musk tweeted on Thursday that he would offer a broad “amnesty” to accounts that Twitter has previously terminated. This would further relax enforcement.

Because hate speech is not protected against governmental action in the E.U. like it is in the United States under the First Amendment, Musk’s policies have put Twitter on a collision course with the E.U. The Digital Services Act, a recent EU law, foresees billion-dollar fines for digital corporations who fail to strictly control their platforms.

The most recent data may be utilised in implementing the new regulation, according to Didier Reynders, the EU justice commissioner.

“Last year, I urged businesses to swiftly halt the general decreasing trend of notice-and-action. Companies must undoubtedly increase their commitment because this has not yet entirely occurred, Reynders said in a statement.

Requests for comment on the study, which E.U. officials released on Thanksgiving, when most U.S. offices are closed, were not immediately answered by Twitter, YouTube, or Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

In a statement, TikTok said that the E.U.’s research is “useful for knowledge exchange, identifying fresh approaches to reinforce our enforcement and improve our policies. As we address the intricate and always changing problem of hate speech, we look forward to continuing our collaboration with the European Commission, NGOs, and other signatories to preserve TikTok a secure, uplifting, and welcoming space for creative expression.”

After Musk finished buying Twitter in late October, the number of racist messages swiftly increased, according to independent researchers.

According to Musk, he is more concerned with preventing offensive posts from going viral by limiting how frequently people view them. Musk claimed in a tweet on Wednesday that such “impressions” of hate speech were down by a third from when he acquired the company, though this claim has not been independently verified by outside researchers.

Posts that encourage “hateful conduct” are forbidden under Twitter’s rules, and as of Thursday, that guideline was still available online.

In his four weeks as Twitter’s owner and CEO, Musk has also laid off or fired a sizable portion of the company’s staff, including those whose responsibility it was to keep an eye out for content that broke Twitter’s rules.

There are also growing tensions between Twitter and Apple and Google, which operate the two largest app stores and have their own guidelines for content regulation.

EU representatives said that in order to alert tech companies to infractions and oversee takedowns, they collaborated with 33 civil society organisations and three public entities.

They have produced seven of these yearly reports since 2016.

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