Three days after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the tech billionaire posted and deleted a tweet spreading a baseless anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the recent attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.
The episode underscored the pressures that Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist,” now faces in running the popular social media website — particularly in how to place limits on misinformation and hate speech on its service. Musk has pledged to advertisers that Twitter won’t become a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership, but at the same time pronounced that unfettered speech should be the norm on the site.
Musk himself appeared to test those limits Sunday, responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, in which she assailed the Republican Party for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories” that she said encouraged the man who attacked Pelosi’s husband, Paul, inside the couple’s home Friday.
Musk linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer, an outlet that has repeatedly spread false information about politics and the coronavirus pandemic. He wrote that “there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” The article presented a version of an unsubstantiated claim that had been circulating in far-right communities online for several days, asserting that Paul Pelosi had been intoxicated and quarelling with a male escort. The Santa Monica Observer’s site was down Sunday but an archived version of the article was reviewed by Bloomberg News.
“Musk’s chaotic takeover has seen trust and safety dangerously sidelined, even as he spreads dangerous conspiracy theories himself to domestic and international politics, to millions of followers,” said Emma Briant, a fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society, part of Central European University. “The arbitrary whims of powerful ideologues are one of the greatest threats to democratic discourse today.”
By early Sunday afternoon, Musk had deleted the tweet. Some of his supporters decried the move as a concession to “the leftist mob.”
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that hate speech had surged on the platform in the hours after Musk’s deal for Twitter closed. Twitter is forming a content-moderation council and decisions on content and account reinstatement are on hold until the group is convened, Musk has said.
In a series of tweets Saturday, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said that Twitter determined “nearly all” of the accounts posting slurs and other derogatory terms were “inauthentic,” and that Twitter had taken action to ban the users involved in the trolling campaign.
But the volume of hate speech on the platform has remained elevated. A racist slur soared 1,700% on the platform on Saturday evening, peaking at 215 mentions every five seconds, according to data from Dataminr, an official Twitter partner that has access to the entire platform.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to questions from Bloomberg News.
