Welcome to a new section of Nightcap that I'm tentatively calling "Wait, what?" where I ask hard-hitting questions.
Questions like, "Are you kidding me?" and "Seriously?"
Today's topic: Actual Nazis on Twitter in the Year 2022.
If you wisely spent your weekend not reading the internet, you might have missed the latest on the literal neo-Nazi that's been welcomed back on Twitter.
On Friday, Twitter reinstated the account of Andrew Anglin, a self-professed white supremacist who founded the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Anglin is, as you might surmise from his whole "being a white supremacist" thing, a troll who was booted from Twitter a decade ago.
And if you're thinking, like, OK sure but who cares I don't even use Twitter... standby.
You may not care about Twitter or the trolls who spew hate and send death threats to journalists on it (true story!). But this is an important business story because of what it says about the site's chief executive.
Elon Musk has owned Twitter for a little over a month, and in that time he's vowed to reinstate some banned accounts on the basis of "free speech" while not letting the site turn into a "free-for-all hellscape."
It's not going great.
Under Musk, the volume of hate speech on Twitter has grown dramatically, according to research published Friday by two watchdog groups.
- Daily use of racial slurs against Black people is triple the 2022 average, the researchers said.
- Slurs against gay men are up 58%.
- Anti-trans speech is up 62%.
- Antisemitic content is on the rise as well, according to the Anti-Defamation League. (And no, it's not all coming from Kanye West, though the rapper now known as Ye did have his account suspended yet again last week.)
Musk responded to a New York Times article about the research by tweeting "utterly false." He claims that "hate speech impressions," aka number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, has declined since he took the helm.
BIG PICTURE
What Musk has never seemed to grasp is that advertisers and users alike don't want to hang out with people like Andrew Anglin. It's bad for business, bad for society, just all around bad.
So far, Musk has approached content moderation minimally, in an ad hoc, deeply subjective way.
For example: Musk said he wouldn't reinstate Alex Jones, the far-right-wing conspiracy theorist who once claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, because Musk is personally offended by him. (Specifically, Musk said he has "no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain.")
All of which is to say, the only person deciding what's offensive on Twitter is Elon Musk, and if there's trauma that exists outside of his own lived experience, well, it doesn't seem to count.
Advertisers, which provide 90% of Twitter's revenue, aren't loving this.
According to the New York Times, Twitter's US ad revenue was 80% percent below internal expectations for the first week of the World Cup — typically a huge traffic event for the company.
Musk's chaotic behavior itself is worrying some brands. GM paused its advertising on Twitter this fall, seeking assurances that its data wouldn't be shared with Tesla, according the to the Times, citing two people familiar with the situation.
Bottom line: Twitter remains an influential platform for politicians, academics, journalists and celebrities. But Musk's sphere of influence is much wider. He's the CEO behind the vast majority of electric vehicles on the road in the US; he wants to bore holes into the ground and to solve "soul-destroying traffic;" he's already sent human beings into space; he believes his SpaceX will save humanity by colonizing Mars.
At this point, no one in the business world has the luxury of ignoring Musk.
RELATED: Nike is cutting ties with Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving in response to Irving's posts to an antisemitic film.
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