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

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition, and the series of content policy changes that ensued, has led to a dramatic spike in hateful, violent and inaccurate posts on the platform, according to researchers. That's now the top challenge for Twitter's new Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino, who has to address advertisers' concerns about the trend in order to boost revenue and pay back the company's debts.

Musk and Yaccarino have touted updates to the site's policies, such as letting advertisers prevent their posts from showing up next to certain kinds of content. Still, advertising sales are down by half since Musk took control of the company in October, he said this week. That's in part because businesses don't believe there has been significant progress in resolving the problem.

“Musk is not keeping his promises to advertisers, and their ads are appearing next to really harmful content,” said Callum Hood, director of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

During Musk's tenure, hate speech towards minority communities increased, according to the CCDH. Reports of harassment went up and extremist content spiked, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And Covid-19 misinformation rose, according to Media Matters.

Twitter, after reviewing the research reports, said many of the harmful pieces of content have since been evaluated and addressed, in some cases through labeling, downranking or removing the posts. More than 99.99% of Tweet impressions, or times a tweet was seen, are from content that does not violate Twitter's rules, according to the company.

After this story's publication, Yaccarino tweeted, calling the researchers' findings “incorrect, misleading and outdated.”

Twitter has made a series of changes to its