In case you missed it, Kanye West was banned from Twitter last week. Again.
The final straw this time was an image posted by the rapper, who now goes by Ye, of a swastika surrounded by the Star of David.
He was previously banned from Twitter in October, after unleashing a series of antisemitic tweets, including one in which he threatened to “go death con 3 on Jewish people,” a few weeks after displaying a “White Lives Matter” shirt at a Paris Fashion Week event. It was the latest and wildest plot twist after years of increasingly inexcusable behaviour from someone who has (had?) tens of millions of followers.
Still, those revolting words and actions on their own weren’t enough to convince Twitter’s new owner that maybe it might be a bad idea to continue giving the man a public platform. Magnate Elon Musk officially bought the social media platform at the end of October, turning the formerly public company private in a $44-billion deal motivated, at least in part, by Musk’s concerns about Twitter’s moderation policies and their effect on “free speech” and democracy. Or at least the definition of free speech he subscribes to.
To that end, among Musk’s first priorities following the takeover were reinstating several individuals barred by Twitter’s former management, like West, and President Donald Trump, who earned himself a permanent ban for tweets that incited violence during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
(Just to prove his point, West doubled down on his most recent exile from Twitter with an appearance on InfoWars—that’s the one hosted by that guy who claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax—alongside a Holocaust denier, where West stated several inconceivable sentences I don’t feel like I need to repeat here. Let’s just say the show’s absolutely deranged conspiracy-theorist host came out looking like the reasonable one.)
Since Musk’s takeover, more than half of Twitter’s staff have been fired or resigned, and its advertisers are reportedly dropping. Musk ended the enforcement of a policy aimed at curbing COVID misinformation. Not surprisingly, the amount of hate speech on the platform is on the rise.
According to a Dec. 2 report from the New York Times, “slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day,” before Musk took over Twitter. “After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.”
Meanwhile, slurs targeted towards gay men popped up 2,506 times a day, on average, rising to 3,964 times a day after the takeover, while “antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 per cent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.”
The findings came from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms, according to the Times. The report found Twitter accounts associated with groups like the Islamic State and QAnon have also seen a resurgence since Musk’s deal was finalized.
I remember when I first created a Twitter account. I was in Grade 11, at school working on a project. One of my classmates was trying to win a contest to meet Justin Bieber, or something.
I didn’t fully grasp the idea of Twitter. Was it just to send messages to your favourite celebrities? To update the friends who didn’t have BlackBerry Messenger about your current emotional status or plan for the day? (I don’t think my friend won the contest, for the record.)
But not even Twitter’s creators had a super-clear idea of what they were building, at the time. “Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning,” co-founder Evan Williams explained in 2013, “which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.”
Twitter’s superpower became updating a large group of people with need-to-know information, often immediately. Like in the event of a public emergency, for example.
Otherwise, it kind of sucks.
For years, I’ve avoided it as much as someone with the words “Social Media Editor” in their job title can, using Twitter only sporadically, almost exclusively for professional purposes. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.
It’s the platform that invites the snarkiest of internet users to be their snarkiest selves. That snarky-ness can breed some truly top-notch humour, for sure, and once in a while there’s some heartwarming or enlightening content sprinkled among the hate speech. But making a thoughtful point in 280 characters or less is a skill that few people possess. (And the funniest tweets always make their way to Instagram meme accounts anyways.) Still, it’s a platform used by hundreds of millions of people that, like it or not, has become enormously influential in shaping the collective conversation.
Now, the capacity and willingness to stamp out or at least regulate that hate speech and misinformation looks like it has been decimated. At what point does the danger posed by that approach outweigh Twitter’s usefulness as an information network?
I’m not sure if society is collectively as over Twitter as I am, but if other platforms have anything to say about it, it might be sooner than we think.
