According to a study by Counter for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that oversees the moderation and management of hateful content online, Twitter accounts that pay for a Twitter Blue subscription would be subject to less careful moderation.
To carry out this study, published on Thursday, June 1, the organization identified a hundred Twitter Blue accounts, thus paying $8 per month to access certain functions of the social network. Of those 100 accounts, they flagged any tweet that was hateful or violated the platform’s moderation rules. The organization was thus able to observe that 99% of the posts in question had still not been removed, one month after the reports.
In addition, paying Twitter Blue subscribers benefit from better visibility on the social network, whose algorithm puts them ahead. This applies to both general news and replies to tweets. “In the example of a thread containing 100 tweets from unsubscribed accounts, the responses that appeared first were from a blue Twitter account calling for violence against migrants,” the report states.
explicit hate speech
As for the content of the tweets in question, they leave no doubt about their need to be deleted: they contain explicitly racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or even Nazi comments. The Center for Countering Digital Hate explains in the report that this situation “is not a surprise”:
Twitter’s means of moderation have long been known to be insufficient: in late 2021, BFMTV revealed that the company employed fewer than 2,000 moderators worldwide, or one moderator for 200,000 users. Since the arrival of Elon Musk at the head of the social network, and the numerous layoffs that have resulted from it, moderation has become increasingly lawless, giving free rein to hatred and conspiracy theories, among others.
Source: BFM TV
