Hate Speech Rules Twitter’s New Feature

Twitter’s live audio space has reportedly become the place to be for white nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and Taliban supporters. Its live audio feature known as Spaces turned out to be a struggle to moderate in terms of offensive content and misinformation.

The Washington Post reported that numerous offensive comments have been made against transgender people, Black Americans, etc., on this live audio platform. On top of this, Twitter accidentally promoted some harmful live audio chats, reportedly due to a bug. 

CNET reached out to Twitter on a quest to find out how many live audio chats had been taken down due to rule violations. However, the company wouldn’t provide any information.

All this occurred after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down from his role as CEO in November. 

Generally, Twitter lets its users report harmful content that violates Twitter’s community rules. The company keeps the flagged content for 30 days, during which it analyzes it to find if there’s, indeed, something against the rules there.

Additionally, it uses filters and software that detect offensive words in titles of this audio space. However, the social media mogul doesn’t employ moderators to perform this task in real-time.

Furthermore, current and former employees claimed that the company rushed to release the feature without sufficient testing due to pressure from investors.

Interestingly, Twitter isn’t the only platform that struggles to contain the spread of misinformation and the use of offensive language. For example, Clubhouse, another social audio app, was also swarmed by misinformation around the same time.