Twitter rejects Guardian article alleging failure against hate tweets

Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the microblogging site has remained surrounded by incessant controversies.

According to an article published by The Guardian, the social media giant — with around 396.5 million users worldwide — has failed in curbing hate speech on its platform, particularly inciting antisemitism and racism.

However, Twitter has dismissed these claims as "extremely misleading" and refuted the story highlighting its challenges in addressing hate-filled tweets.

In the wake of the British outlet's story, the Musk-owned company now finds itself under scrutiny and potentially facing a legal challenge due to its alleged failure to remove such content as reported by users.

The article by The Guardian highlights that the matter was brought forward by the European Union of Jewish Students EUJS and researchers at HateAid, a German organisation that campaigns for human rights in the digital space.

Despite alerts about "six antisemitic or otherwise racist tweets in January this year", the California-based platform did not remove them while going against its own moderation policy.

"Four of the tweets denied the Holocaust in explicit terms, one said 'blacks should be gassed and sent with space x to Mars', while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programmes to mass extermination in Nazi death camps," the outlet mentioned in its story.

It added that the tweets were reported in January, but the Musk-owned application ruled against the tweets violating its guidelines, as per the legal action quoted by the British publication.

Twitter, on the other hand, said the "purportedly 'landmark' lawsuit concerns six Tweets, and all of those tweets were actioned" and shared the way it has worked to resolve the specific matter on its platform.

The tech giant claimed that its systems "automatically detected" that all six Tweets were "either toxic or abusive" and were reported focused on its terms of service of violations.

"Twitter immediately restricted the reach of all six tweets (less than 100 impressions per Tweet)," the platform mentioned in a tweet.

No person, it added, reported any of the tweets to Twitter under its German legal compliance option.

"After the suits were filed, triggering compliance review, four Tweets were blocked in Germany and two were removed for terms of service violations," the Musk-owned platform stated.

Twitter also slammed The Guardian for citing two misleading “reports".

"One report claims that Tweets containing anti-Semitic slurs are on the rise on Twitter since its acquisition. The truth is that the number of user impressions of anti-Semitic slurs has gone down since Twitter’s acquisition, both in total and on a per Tweet basis," it clarified.

The other report, according to Twitter, claims that the application failed to act on 99% of hateful content posted by Twitter Blue subscribers.

"That figure is blatantly false and Twitter makes moderation decisions with no regard for a user's Twitter Blue status," it added.