Australia’s online safety watchdog has issued a legal notice to Twitter demanding an explanation of what the social media giant is doing to tackle a surge in online hate since Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the platform.
Australia’s eSafety Commission describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online. The agency said yesterday that it received more complaints about online hate on Twitter in the past 12 months than any other platform and had received an increasing number of reports of serious online abuse since Musk took over the company in October.
The Australian agency’s boss, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, said she sent a notice to the San Francisco-based company Wednesday with 36 detailed questions on how Twitter’s policies about hateful conduct are enforced.
If Twitter does not respond with factual and truthful responses to all questions within 28 days, an Australian judge could fine the company up to 700,000 Australian dollars ($476,000) for every day of delay, Inman Grant said.
“The whole idea of the basic online safety expectations is that global companies like Twitter are enforcing their own policies … and that they’ve got people and technology to keep their platforms safe,” Inman Grant said.
“They have a Hateful Conduct policy that says you may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, etc., and I want to know if fundamentally they are enforcing this policy and how effectively they are doing so,” she added.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment yesterday.
The eSafety notice followed Musk’s announcement in November that he was granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts. This led to 62,000 banned or suspended users being reinstated to the platform, including 75 accounts with more than 1 million followers each, eSafety said in a statement.
Twitter’s global workforce had been slashed under Musk from 8,000 employees to 1,500, with trust and safety teams shed. Twitter had removed all public policy staff from Australia.
Inman Grant said Indigenous Australians, disabled people and those who identify as LGBTQ+ experience online hate at double the rate of other Australians.
“A third of all reports into our office of online hate are coming from Twitter. It’s been a huge surge since October ‘22 when Elon Musk took over,” Inman Grant told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “Twitter has always been fiery in terms of discourse, but it’s turned into an absolute bin fire.”
“A lot of the changes to the algorithms have made people feel like you see more toxicity, much more coarse discourse. But without lifting the hood and using these transparency powers, we really don’t know what’s happening and this is where we’re trying to get to the bottom of things,” she added.
Australians are not alone in their increasingly hostile experience with Twitter. American advocacy group GLAAD said last week that all major social media platforms do poorly at protecting LGBTQ+ users from hate speech and harassment. But Twitter was the worst.
In its annual Social Media Safety Index, GLAAD gave Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter low or failing scores, saying the platforms don’t do enough to keep their users safe. That said, most improved from a year ago. ROD McGUIRK, CANBERRA, MDT/AP
