When the richest man in the world - Elon Musk - bought Twitter the company was thrown into chaos.
I’m looking for something that’s broadly inclusive as possible as a system, that’s
trusted as possible and I hope we’re successful in that regard.
The social platforms employees are due to find any minute now whether they still have a job.
I try to log in and my email is just not working anymore.
And that’s when I knew that I had been laid off.
It’s not so much the concern of the hellscape right now. It’s the chaos.
Elon Musk says that he will begin restoring previously banned Twitter accounts.
For the past few months, I’ve been investigating what that chaos means for people that use Twitter.
Former employees have been telling me their concerns that - under Musk’s leadership - the
social media site can no longer protect users from trolls and other harmful content.
When I published my report, I caught Musk’s attention. He tweeted..
“Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise into place that has trolls”
And
“Have to admit trolls are kinda fun”
And it wasn’t just his attention I caught - an
army of troll accounts joined in and a deluge of hate came my way.
I’m not just me who has received more abuse since the Twitter
takeover.. —
I’m Marianna Spring, the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent, and this is
“Trolled” from BBC Trending. In this series, we’re investigating how people are targeted and
abused on social media - and who’s behind the trolling - from Myanmar to Brazil.
But first - we’re looking at Twitter itself,
and how after the richest person in the world bought the company - and hate is thriving. The
trolls are back. —
As a journalist, I am on Twitter a lot. It’s a vital tool for me to share my work
and connect with people who are affected by disinformation, conspiracies and online hate.
I am used to getting abuse on the platform. And funnily enough,
it’s my own online abuse that got me looking into this in the first place.
I noticed I wasn’t receiving as much online hate as usual throughout last
year - 2022. But then it took a turn for the worst following
Musk’s takeover and it wasn’t just me who noticed more hate on the site.
I posted a tweet on 3rd January 2023 and it reads:
“In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2018, I was raped while unconscious by
someone I trusted. This was the beginning of a cycle of abuse that lasted years.
Ellie Wilson started campaigning on Twitter about violence against women last summer,
after the man who raped her was convicted and later sentenced to five years in prison.
At first, the response to her activism was positive.
I think that I would’ve been more apprehensive if I thought, you know,
that there was a possibility of me receiving hate online.
But then, in January of this year, something changed.
All of a sudden these trolls appeared.
She received an onslaught of hateful posts. A wave
of horrific messages with abusive language and misogynistic slurs.
‘someone is after celeb status’ ‘sorry I don’t believe this girl one bit’
‘revels in the attention’ ‘you deserve it. I’m not a hater. I’m just stating the obvious’
And those are some of the milder ones that we can read out…
I think when I saw the first hateful comment, I just felt like my stomach and my heart just
drop. You hear about this happening online but it’s quite something to then experience
it personally, because I’ve never had that before. It was heartbreaking to be honest.
I find it most difficult, the people that say that I wasn’t raped or that
this didn’t happen and that I’m lying. But also it’s sort of like a secondary trauma.
The period in which my online hate seemed to get worse mirrored what Ellie experienced too.
So I set out to find out whether there really was more abuse on Twitter, and if so, why.
I’m Doctor Julie Posetti, I’m a researcher,
and journalist lead researcher at the International Centre for Journalists.
Julie has been investigating online violence against female
journalists - including myself - for three and a half years.
In the course of this work we’ve looked at around 18 million social media posts.
Julie reviewed the abuse I received across three periods. The first in spring of 2021,
the second in early 2022 and the third, once Elon Musk had taken over later that year.
She did find the abuse I received had lessened before that takeover…
We can see that the abuse against you has dramatically declined by something like,
45 times. And what’s really interesting about that is that in the intervening period we know
that Twitter had started to introduce policies designed to protect people who
are being targeted prolifically like you, specifically people who were journalists
and human rights defenders for example who were being targeted because of their work.
But, then - under Musk’s leadership, the abuse noticeably increased.
The abuse against you has more than tripled,
and that’s according to what our tools determine to be obvious abuse so it’s quite possible that
the uptick has been much more extreme than that but that’s what we can see for now.
We can’t know for certain why abuse targeting me or Ellie suddenly got worse.
And it’s important to note Ellie’s Twitter following was smaller back
when she was receiving less hate. But Julie does have some ideas…
I mean the logical conclusion is that we are detecting more
abuse because there is more abuse and there is more abuse because
A some of the abusive accounts have been reinstated, or allowed to proliferate,
B the tools and the mechanisms and the teams that were focused on monitoring, cases of abuse towards
you and towards women journalists in general, because this has been a special focus, on women
journalists, but particularly emblematic cases like yours, the fact that you’re starting to see
this increase points to the you know, decline and failure of those systems that were being built up.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October, he had two clear priorities: to make the social media
company profitable and to champion freedom of expression. And he’s taken strong action
to enact his vision: since the takeover over half of Twitter’s workforce have been sacked or chosen
to leave, and thousands of previously banned accounts have been allowed back onto the platform.
And when I looked into the accounts targeting Ellie,
some of them had become more active since Musk’s take over,
suggesting they'd been suspended previously and recently reinstated, others were newly created.
Why are these accounts that are bullying and harassing people still allowed on the platform?
I don’t really feel protected by Twitter and I think that
I’ve reported things on Twitter in the past and nothing has come of it. So I
don’t really have much faith in the platform for actually taking these things seriously.
I traveled to sunny San Francisco, the home of Twitter’s headquarters,
to hear from the insiders who worked there.
Twitter from the very beginning was about freedom of expression, right? Our founders
really strongly believed in it. The idea that everyone everywhere deserves to be heard.
That’s Lisa Jennings Young. She was the head of content design and started at Twitter in 2019,
working there for four years on features designed to protect users - like Ellie and I - from online
hate. Lisa acknowledges some of the concerns Musk had around moderation on the platform,
and that abuse was always a problem on Twitter.
The idea of absolute free speech doesn't exist because when one person,
one person can shut down a lot of people from having that right as well.
So we realised those trade-offs between that safety, privacy and free speech.
It was not at all perfect. But we were trying and we were making things better,
you know, all the time, you know, working as as hard as we could.
Lisa worked on various protective measures. That includes safety mode - which aims to automatically
block abusive accounts - and another called the ‘nudge’ function, to scan tweets and ask users
if they want to reconsider posting something potentially abusive. Twitter’s own research,
seen by the BBC, appears to show the “nudge” and other safety tools being effective.
So it really blew us away. 31% of people, people editing or deleting their replies, edited or
deleted their replies when given a chance via the nudge. So that's 31% of people chose
to edit or delete when presented with this nudge. And that's really, really significant.
These safety features were being implemented around the period when my abuse on Twitter
seemed to decrease, according to Julie’s data. It’s impossible to directly correlate the two,
but given what Lisa tells me about how effective the measures appeared to be, it seems possible
draw a link. I asked Lisa whether there’s still a team working on features like this at Twitter.
No. There's no one there to work on that at this time. Yeah. Yeah. The
design or design and research, We had over 200 people and, you know, there's
just. Just a few people left. Product designers, but no content designers left.
Given that Lisa’s team has been drastically cut, I wanted to see whether the harmful
reply nudge was still working. So we conducted a little experiment…
Let's test out the harmful reply nudge. Okay. I've got this account,
which is a dummy account. It's totally private. It doesn't have
any followers or friends. And we've agreed that we can tweet at you.
And you can. Yeah.
What would normally trigger that harmful reply nudge.
let's try something like,
Twitter employees are lazy losers, you know, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and die.
Okay. No nudge.
Interesting.
When we sent a tweet that included a swear word,
the nudge did appea. But Lisa said it should work more than just that.
Our experiment does show that the feature appears to be working less consistently.
And when I spoke to an engineer still at Twitter,
they confirmed to me that there was no-one taking care of features like
this - and that the social media site was like a building where “all the pieces are on fire”.
This isn’t just about hate coming from a handful of
trolls. It can be state-sponsored and coordinated.
I spoke to staff from Twitter who worked to tackle harassment campaigns like this - often targeting
journalists, dissidents and activists in countries without the media freedom we have in the UK.
The most prominent examples of influence operations that a lot of people have
probably heard about are the 2016 operation by Russia's Internet Research Agency to influence
the 2016 elections in the US all the way to the Myanmar military's influence operation,
which was waged against the Rohingya in Myanmar.
That’s Ray. His team was in charge of identifying,
assessing and shutting down malicious state sponsored influence operations.
I think one of the things that’s central to an influence operation
is the use of fake accounts or inauthentic accounts. So accounts which purport often to be
someone or a group of people located somewhere when in fact they're not.
Once an influence operation had been identified,
the accounts involved would be suspended, or the visibility of their posts would be reduced.
Twitter had invested in big teams to tackle this type of manipulation on the platform.
We were about two dozen in total, which included policy folks all the way to,
you know, investigators that were doing technical investigations to really data heavy folks.
I don't think it's exaggeration to say that that team did that work daily.
Either the disruption of accounts, fake accounts and other accounts
and attribution of them. Yeah, I would say every every couple of weeks that was taking place.
After Musk took over, key members of staff involved in
tackling these influence operations were laid off.
What does this mean for Twitter?
Twitter might have been the refuge where, you know, a journalist could go out and had their
voice be heard and be critical of government. But I'm not sure that's going be the case anymore.
Unlike many of their colleagues, neither Ray nor Lisa were made redundant from Twitter after
Musk took over. But they decided they could no longer work at the company under his leadership.
I spent a lot of my career, protecting the civil and political rights of folks around the world.
Working in an NGO for something like six years, going to the UN to work on human
rights investigations and then ending up at Twitter where I thought, you know my background,
my work experience, working in places like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine,
could be useful. And I wasn't sure that the new Twitter cared about any of those things anymore.
I wanted to ask Elon Musk about his vision for Twitter, and whether he had any response
to revelations made by current and former Twitter employees - including Ray and Lisa.
I reached out to him via email and message, and even used an eye-catching
but unscientific Twitter vote to catch his attention. But there was no reply
from Musk - and no response from Twitter to the points raised in the investigation.
I’d been told that all of Twitter's communications team have either resigned or been sacked.
But then - when the investigation went live online - it did elicit that series of tweets from Musk.
“Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise
into place that has trolls,” he said in one, posting a screengrab of the report.
According to Twitter’s own data, that tweet was seen by over 30 million Twitter profiles.
“Trolls are kinda fun,” he said in another.
The investigation made clear Twitter was never perfect. I’ve spent the last few
years exposing how trolling affects people on Twitter and other social media platforms.
But what it did highlight is how hate has worsened and how under Musk, insiders think Twitter is no
longer capable of protecting users against trolls. True to that – after Musk’s came a torrent
of abuse against me from other uses. From posts with misogynistic slurs and
abusive language to threatening messages, including depicting kidnap and hanging.
When Musk said “roflmao” - rolling on the floor laughing my ass off - in response to
a tweet making light of the investigation, I wasn’t rolling on the floor laughing.
I was wading through abusive messages sent from accounts predominantly based in the US and the UK,
many seemed to have been reinstated - some were prominent conspiracy theorists and
right-wing accounts brought back under Musk’s amnesty on suspended accounts.
Several had the new paid-for blue ticks.
The way this unfolded confirmed what I’d already uncovered.
I approached Twitter and Musk again. They’ve not responded.
A lot of the trolls getting in touch with me said
the same thing. Don’t stick around then - leave Twitter if the hate is so bad.
And that invites a bigger question - if the company is falling apart, and you’re targeted
by hate - why keep using the platform? Is Twitter still relevant? Here’s what Ray had to say.
So much of the world's media is on Twitter. Governments are on Twitter,
right? Yes. Heads of state are on Twitter. And
I would say opinion makers ArE on Twitter, there are second order effects, which filter down into
like all the media we consume into like popular culture. So I think it's really important for
that reason. And it's, and it's so it's really important to. understand, right? When opinion
is being made, like when the sausage is being made, who's making it? How are they doing it?
It’s a place I want to keep using, but I’m well aware of the risks that come with that. Julie was
concerned over the potentially grave consequences of allowing hate to proliferate on Twitter.
When the person who now owns the platform signals it’s okay mate, say what you like, we’re more
tolerant of that kind of thing now which is what we’ve heard, that’s an entreaty to do and say what
you want, and to do so with impunity and that’s one of the things that really concerns us because
attacks on journalists, crimes against journalists including murder with impunity are a serious
problem and we know that there are connections with the online violence that they experience
and the threats that they experience before arguably more egregious physical assaults occur.
As for Ellie, she still sees the positives of the platform.
It’s a way for me to process my trauma. I’ve managed to build a community around this and
it helps me and others feel less alone and I think it also makes me feel a lot better knowing that I
can maybe make things a little bit better for other people and that I can raise awareness.
I don’t think that I should have to silence myself
just to you know, avoid the ire of a small subset of angry and in my opinion pathetic people.
Ellie isn’t planning to stop campaigning on the site any time soon,
despite the online hate receives. Twitter says defending and protecting a user's voice
is still a key value - but the storm of abuse on the platform continues.
That’s it for this edition of BBC Trending’s ‘Trolled’ series with me Marianna Spring.
A huge thanks to producers Beth Godwin and Olivia Lace-Evans,
and Hal Haines for mixing this episode.
If you want to get in touch about this episode
then you can do so by emailing me at marianna.spring@bbc.co.uk.
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