Twitter denies that "harmful" content has increased on its platform

Twitter has charged with all the cavalry against the information published this week by Bloomberg, according to which hate, violent and inaccurate publications had increased exponentially in recent months.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
20 July 2023 Thursday 10:57
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Twitter denies that "harmful" content has increased on its platform

Twitter has charged with all the cavalry against the information published this week by Bloomberg, according to which hate, violent and inaccurate publications had increased exponentially in recent months. In a context marked by the crisis with its advertisers, Elon Musk's company has flatly denied these claims through an official statement.

Since Elon Musk's arrival at Twitter, the company has made many changes in relation to its content distribution policy. Shortly after landing at the company, Musk reinstated various accounts banned by the previous administration, referring to freedom of expression. He also reduced the human team of moderators and replaced it with artificial intelligence systems, which earned a reprimand from the European Union.

The result of all these measures is that the control systems have diminished. And consequently, on Twitter you can find entire films, or even the complete World Cup final in Qatar. Additionally, according to Bloomberg, hateful, violent and inaccurate publications proliferate, which affects the flight of advertisers.

"99.99% of Tweet impressions are positive. Which means that only a small amount of content requires compliance. But we will continue to do everything we can to make this platform as safe and healthy as possible," the Twitter statement said. He then explains that the research carried out by Bloomberg contains incorrect or misleading metrics since it has been carried out with outdated techniques, and that, in addition, "it does not provide adequate context or take into account the new updates with solutions that we have made."

The Twitter statement goes on to list the metrics they consider incorrect and refute it with data, such as:

It also lists outdated and old data that has been provided in the Bloomberg report, according to the blue platform:

In addition, from Twitter they explain that they have strong suitability and brand safety controls that are effective in keeping ads safe. "Our brand security engineering team is also actively building more suitability capabilities focused on inventory filtering and pre-offering, which will be available in two weeks." That is, they continue to promote improvements for the convenience of advertisers.

They also wanted to make it clear that "brands can choose on which surfaces (timelines, responses, search results, etc.) their content will appear" and that, of course, they have partnered with "comprehensive industry leaders (such as IAS or DV) to drive post-purchase measurement to increase brand safety and suitability."

Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, has also personally come forward to face these accusations:

"The Bloomberg article stating that harmful content seen on Twitter is on the rise is not true. Here's what is true: Over 99% of the content users and advertisers see on Twitter is healthy. But no matter how much, we will continue to do whatever it takes to make this platform as safe and healthy as possible," the tweet begins. "Over the past 8 months, we've made progress in reducing the spread of hate speech, proactively preventing child exploitation, and giving brands more control over where their ads appear," Yaccarino explains.

He has also taken the opportunity to announce that "in the next two weeks, we will further expand our ad placement controls to better support the tremendous growth in video consumption on the platform. We are actively building a pre-offer inventory filter that will allow even greater control over content adjacencies."