Twitter moderators turn to automation amid a reported surge in hate speech

Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content.

On child safety Irwin said Twitter had shifted toward automatically taking down tweets reported by trusted figures with a track record of accurately flagging harmful posts.

Researchers say the number of tweets containing hateful content on Twitter rose sharply in the week before Musk tweeted on 23 November that impressions, or views, of hateful speech were declining. Tweets containing words that were anti-Black that week were triple the number seen in the month before Musk took over, while tweets containing a gay slur were up 31%, a study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate showed.

She said Twitter took down about 44,000 accounts involved in child safety violations, in collaboration with cybersecurity group Ghost Data.