![]() I take my targeting by bigots as an indicator that my work is upsetting the right people. I don’t recount these stories for sympathy. The same is true of other bigotries once hate is cloaked in coded language and euphemisms, it typically goes unchallenged. When the bigotry moves beyond swastikas and slurs to conspiratorial anti-Semitism-the sort made infamous most recently by Ye-Twitter, like most social-media companies, has never really tried to fix it. When I reported this content, Twitter said it did not violate their terms of service, and backtracked only after embarrassing media coverage.Īnd that’s just the obvious stuff. In 2019, an account impersonated me and Photoshopped a swastika onto a photograph of a baby, claiming that it was my son. In 2017, Twitter banned the bot and left the Nazis. After the election, I built a bot that exposed neo-Nazi accounts impersonating Jews and other minorities on the platform. Twitter subsequently vowed to clean up its act, but though some strides were made, most anti-Semitic bigotry remained. An Anti-Defamation League study found that I received the second-most abuse of Jewish commentators on the site during that cycle. During the 2016 presidential-election campaign, I was inundated with anti-Semitic invective on Twitter over my critical commentary on Donald Trump’s candidacy. Because as it turns out, whether viral misinformation or rampant bigotry, most of Twitter’s pathologies that people are pinning on Musk predate his ownership. I note all of this not to exculpate Twitter but to indict it. As both Musk and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s longtime safety chief, have said, the site’s content policies have not changed. But the rapper’s account had never been suspended it was merely locked following his recent anti-Semitic outburst, which the corrected article now notes. “Ye’s Twitter account appears to be no longer suspended as Elon Musk takes the helm of the company,” reported Bloomberg. “Hours into Twitter’s Elon Musk era, the company has apparently undone its ban on the term ‘groomer’ as a slur against LGBTQ+ people,” wrote The Advocate, when the term had never been banned in the first place. Others have suggested that Musk’s reign has introduced a new era of bigotry on the platform, thanks to allegedly lax moderation policies. (In fact, Twitter’s nascent crowdsourced fact-checking system, Birdwatch, quickly labeled the video in question as misleading, though as usual, this did not stop it from spreading.) “Is this what we are to expect on Twitter moving forward: zero content moderation or fact checking?” asked one Democratic political consultant, seemingly without irony. When a doctored video of former President Barack Obama being mocked at a Wisconsin rally went viral, the writer James Surowiecki rightly lamented, “Account posts totally fake video of Obama, presenting it as real, and it’s retweeted and replied to by thousands of people who think it’s real.” But he prefaced this observation with the words “New Twitter,” as though this didn’t routinely happen on the Old Twitter. Read: Elon Musk’s disastrous weekend on TwitterĪnd yet, in the days since Elon Musk took control of the site, users have taken to blaming this problem and the platform’s other long-standing issues on him. ( It didn’t the channel decided to stop broadcasting there, because of a lack of viewers.) Simply put, Twitter has been a fire hose of ideologically motivated misinformation for years. ( He didn’t the story was from 2008.) And the United Kingdom banned Fox News. ( It wasn’t it had been that way for years.) In a parody of performative progressivism, President Joe Biden inaugurated a line of environmentally friendly bombs. According to popular posts made by users of the site, the Merriam-Webster-dictionary definition of anti-vaxxer was changed in 2021 to include those who oppose vaccine mandates. In the virtual world of Twitter, this was not an isolated incident. Meanwhile, in the real world, Cubans protested in the streets over vaccine scarcity, while China continues its draconian zero-COVID lockdown policy. As of this writing, it is still up on the social-media site. The false claim received more than 56,000 retweets and 252,000 likes. US: If only WE could find a treatment, someone in the PRIVATE SECTOR needs to find a PATENTABLE treatment.” ![]() ![]() “China: Our studies show this Cuban drug has incredibly high success rates. “Cuba: We have an antiviral with demonstrably high success rates in treating patients with COVID-19,” wrote a small-time Communist influencer on the platform in March 2020. Sign up for Yair’s newsletter, Deep Shtetl, here.ĭid you hear about the miracle Cuban coronavirus cure that we never got because of capitalism? If not, you probably aren’t on Twitter, where this fictitious remedy went, well, viral.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |