Instead of relying on its staff to manually check for hate speech, Twitter is increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to moderate content. This comes as hate speech has apparently increased on the platform since Elon Musk took over.
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Last week, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) reported that hate speech on Twitter has increased since Mr. Musk's acquisition.
Another research team at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) had earlier found that use of the N-word (nigger) increased by almost 500 percent in the 12 hours immediately after Mr. Musk's deal to buy Twitter was finalized.
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Additionally, the research showed that hate speech against gay men and anti-Semitic posts increased after Musk's acquisition of the Twitter platform.
Mr. Musk denies these claims, stating that they are completely false.
Twitter is now relying more on automation to control malicious content, amid concerns about the company's ability to police its platform.
Ella Irwin, the company's vice president of Trust and Safety Product, told Reuters that, instead of staff manually reviewing content, the platform now applies restrictions.
“The team is now able to work more effectively and take greater risks,” said Ms. Irwin.
The latest news comes as Twitter grapples with regulating content on its platform, a struggle that has intensified after layoffs last month, in which the company reduced its workforce from 7,500 to 2,000 employees.
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According to reports, the company's entire human rights team and machine learning ethics team were either completely shut down or reduced to a few people, as well as all external partners who worked on security issues for the platform.
The Twitter team responsible for removing child sexual abuse material in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region has been reduced to just one person after layoffs, Wired reports.
Reducing the size of this group also runs counter to Mr. Musk's previous claim that removing such content is his "first priority" after taking over the company.
Last weekend, the microblogging platform was flooded for hours with adult spam content, which researchers said was an attempt to cover up news about widespread protests taking place across China.
Analysts speculated that the spam bot was likely an attempt to keep the world from learning about protests against China.
On Thursday, Ms. Irwin announced that Twitter would now use automation to limit not only hashtags that promote abuse, but also search results in areas related to child exploitation.
He went on to say that the platform will now automatically remove tweets if they are reported by verified individuals who have previously posted this type of content.
Source of information: independent.co.uk
