Trolls flooded Twitter with insults to test Musk, security chief says

Trolls flooded Twitter with insults to test Musk, security chief says

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An organized trolling campaign that tweeted insults tens of thousands of times tested Twitter’s moderation policies after the platform was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, its security chief said on Saturday, adding that the rules “haven’t changed.”

Hours after the takeover by self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk late Thursday, far-right voices celebrated what they described as their newly regained right to free speech, with posts flaunting transgender identity and masks, racial slurs and other derogatory slurs terms were questioned.

But “Twitter’s policies haven’t changed. Hateful behavior has no place here. And we are taking steps to stop an organized effort designed to fool people into believing we did it,” tweeted the platform’s head of security and integrity, Yoel Roth.

Roth said that over the past 48 hours, we’ve “seen a small number of accounts posting a ton of tweets containing slurs and other derogatory terms.”

“To give you a sense of scale, more than 50,000 tweets repeatedly using a particular slur came from just 300 accounts,” he continued.

“Almost all” accounts are not genuine, he said.

“We have taken action to ban users involved in this trolling campaign – and will continue to work to address this over the coming days to make Twitter safe and welcoming for everyone.”

Roth also retweeted a post by Musk in which the Tesla boss reiterated that “we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policy.”

It’s the “yet” that makes many users of the platform nervous about the direction Musk wants to take Twitter, one of the leading platforms for global discourse and diplomacy.

Musk has vowed to call back content moderation and rely more on computer algorithms than human monitors. Conservatives say moderation so far has unfairly targeted their views.

But critics warn that without standards, the world’s “digital marketplace” risks becoming a hotbed of misinformation, with potentially dangerous consequences for democracy and public health.

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