Twitter Signals to Racists, Hate Speech Is Okay
A recent influx of hate speech has been invading the platform and moderators are allowing it
[CONTENT WARNING: RACISM, HATE SPEECH, USE OF N-WORD]
Over the last several months, new accounts (and a few that were dormant) began a campaign of trolling using hate speech. We’ve seen racist conversations in Twitter Spaces being promoted out in the open and one of our Writers and Editors of Color Spaces for “The Case for the 1619 Project” was infiltrated by a clown spouting the n-word over and over again. Clearly, an already out-of-control problem, and despite the claimed efforts of Twitter Safety, a growing one.
Enter Twitter’s escalation of hate speech.
It started with a tweet referring to a Black woman as a ni××er. A highly offensive tweet. Several users claimed they reported and received emails from Twitter saying the account didn’t violate their policies. Knowing Twitter least appears to disallow such language, I stopped what I was doing and reported the tweet. Within a couple of hours, I received the same email seen in so many screenshots with Twitter saying the account “hasn’t broken our safety policies.”\
To be clear, Twitter’s safety policy states, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Yet, here we are.
With all of Twitter’s issues revolving around allowing the promotion of hate and extremism, once Jack Dorsey left, many expected a shift to the political right and the return of the far-right language of bigotry.
I guess users called that one.
Listen, we all know what happens when extremist language goes unchecked. We saw it when shooters began executing dozens of non-white people all over the country along with the constant harassment and assault of Black people and people of color. We’ve also seen it with the rise in attacks on the Asian community. It’s a never-ending cycle because people are far too complacent.
Now, with Twitter apparently taking the approach of citing hate speech as not violating their “safety policies,” can we expect yet another rise in hate crimes because of social media vitriol? It appears that way. Donald Trump inciting people to kill, mail bombs, and physically and verbally attack people in public used the same platform. They didn’t stop him until the insurrection. Until there was an attack on our government in an attempt to overthrow it.
Twitter isn’t only signaling to racists that throwing the n-word around is cool again, they’re also letting us know that it’s acceptable for bigots to sling hateful language at non-white people. At us. By not removing the language, they are validating it and sending a message to other racists to come back to the platform. A continuation of such a policy moving forward would make Twitter no safer for Black people and people of color than Parler or Gab.
In other words, Twitter will never be a safe place for non-white people. White supremacists are conducting what appears to be a coordinated attack that began on or about November 20th and continues unabated today. New leadership at Twitter is making short work of reversing safety policies that began with removing hate speech in its infancy. Now, we’re back to the time when Twitter was barely usable and struggled to stay afloat - largely because of the unfettered hate that was rampant on the platform.
As for us in the anti-racism community, particularly non-white anti-racists, we’re in for an onslaught of racism and bigotry. The culprit is the rampant indifference in society. Particularly in the tech sector.
Stay strong. Stay vigilant. Keep fighting.
Much love.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, as of this writing the Tweet in question is still up.
Arturo is a first-generation Cuban American navigating the intersection of politics and race and publisher of The Antagonist Magazine. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also support his work here and here. If you’d like to read more of Arturo’s work and the work of thousands of others, you can join Medium here.