‘99.99% of tweet impressions are healthy’
Twitter issues strong rebuke to Bloomberg report on its content
July 19, 2023
Twitter on Wednesday clarified that 99.99% of impressions seen on tweets are “healthy”.
The Elon Musk-owned company issued the clarification in response to a Bloomberg story regarding harmful content viewed on the microblogging website in the last six months.
“This is an absolutely false assertion. 99.99% of Tweet impressions are healthy. Which means only a tiny amount of content requires enforcement. But we’ll keep doing whatever we can to make this platform as safe and healthy as possible,” Twitter said.
Twitter also said that the Bloomberg report was based on “outdated research that contains incorrect or misleading metrics”.
“The article does not properly provide the right context or new updates to the remediations we have made since the third party research was conducted,” it added.
What did Bloomberg report?
The publication had reported citing researchers that since the content policy changes brought in by Musk after taking over Twitter, there has been a “dramatic spike in hateful, violent and inaccurate posts on the platform”.
The publication stated that the changes in the policies are one of the major challenges for Twitter's new Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino.
“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 (CCDH), as quoted by Bloomberg.
The CCDH report showed that after Musk’s takeover, hate speech towards minority communities increased. While reports of harassment went up and extremist content spiked, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And COVID-19 misinformation rose, according to Media Matters.
Since Musk’s takeover of the microblogging website, Twitter has multiple changes to its content moderation, that has led to actions such as the reinstatement of accounts previously banned for violating the platform’s policies and removing the verification labels on high-profile accounts that don’t want to pay for a checkmark.
