Online hateHate speech is still easy to find on social media
The alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s activity on the Gab social media site has drawn attention to that site’s role as a hate-filled alternative to more mainstream options like Facebook and Twitter. Those are among the social media platforms that have promised to fight hate speech and online abuse on their sites. However, as I explored online activity in the wake of the shooting, it quickly became clear to me that the problems are not just on sites like Gab. Rather, hate speech is still easy to find on mainstream social media sites, including Twitter. I also identified some additional steps the company could take.
Shortly after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the word “Jews” was trending on Twitter. As a social media researcher and educator, I became concerned that the violence would spread online, as it has in the past.
The alleged synagogue shooter’s activity on the Gab social media site has drawn attention to that site’s role as a hate-filled alternative to more mainstream options like Facebook and Twitter. Those are among the social media platforms that have promised to fight hate speech and online abuse on their sites.
However, as I explored online activity in the wake of the shooting, it quickly became clear to me that the problems are not just on sites like Gab. Rather, hate speech is still easy to find on mainstream social media sites, including Twitter. I also identified some additional steps the company could take.
Incomplete responses to new hate terms
I was expecting new threats to appear online surrounding the Pittsburgh shooting, and there were signs that was happening. In a recent anti-Semitic attack, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan used the word “termite” to describe Jewish people. I searched for this term, knowing racists were likely to use the new slur as a code word to avoid detection when expressing anti-Semitism.
Twitter had not suspended Farrakhan’s account in the wake of yet another of his anti-Semitic statements, and Twitter’s search function automatically suggested I might be searching for the phrase “termite eats bullets.” That turns Twitter’s search box into a hate-speech billboard.
The company had, however, apparently adjusted some of its internal algorithms, because no tweets with anti-Semitic uses of the word “termite” showed up in my search results.
Posts unnoticed for years
As I continued my searches for hate speech and calls for violence against Jewish people, I found even more disturbing evidence of shortfalls in Twitter’s content moderation system. In the wake of the 2016 U.S. election and the discovery that Twitter was being used to influence the election, the company said it was investing in machine learning to “detect and mitigate the effect on users of fake, coordinated, and automated account activity.” Based on what I found, these systems have not identified even very simple, clear and direct violent threats and hate speech that have been on its site for years.
When I reported a tweet posted in 2014 that advocated killing Jewish people “for fun,” Twitter took it down the same day – but its standard automated Twitter notice gave no explanation of why it had been left untouched for more than four years.
