Corresponding postings have doubled – but only 8.5 percent are deleted.
Since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter in October 2022, the number of anti-Semitic tweets on the microblogging service has skyrocketed. According to analysis by media platform The Conversation, the tech firm CASM Technology and des Institute for Strategic Dialogue Corresponding postings have more than doubled in the months since the takeover. The experts criticize that only just under 8.5 percent of the anti-Semitic content was removed again during this period.
Reached new hatred level
“When a sharp rise in anti-Semitic messages was registered on Twitter in the days after Elon Musk took power, the portal’s security chief at the time blamed it on a ‘concentrated, short-term troll campaign’. However, our research now clearly shows that the opposite is true,” says Carl Miller in his report for The Conversation. In reality, however, we are dealing here with a completely new level of anti-Semitic hatred.
The causes are complex: “Musk, who likes to portray himself as a champion of free speech, has steered Twitter in a fundamentally different direction since the takeover,” says Miller. The US billionaire, for example, dissolved the in-house ‘Trust and Safety Council’, which was responsible for controlling and removing inappropriate material on the platform. In addition, numerous previously suspended accounts were reactivated and more than half of the employees were saved. “A lot of them were also involved in fighting hate speech,” Miller said.
One million tweets evaluated
To find out how much anti-Semitic thought is actually spread via Twitter, the scientist and co-founder of the British Center for Analysis of Social Media together with his partners combined 22 algorithms and machine learning approaches that have been specially trained to detect hate speech. Between June 1, 2022 and February 9, 2023, over a million tweets were recorded and evaluated that contained at least one of 119 previously defined keywords associated with anti-Semitism.
A total of 325,739 reports were identified in this way that could be classified as “plausibly anti-Semitic”. These were posted by 146,516 different user accounts. Before Musk took over, there were an average of 6,204 anti-Semitic tweets per week, after which this number has increased by 105 percent to 12,762.
