Elon Musk’s so-called free speech crusade is making Twitter a more hateful place, reports from two watchdog groups charge.
According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, slurs against black people have tripled under Musk; anti-gay and anti-trans slurs have risen 58% and 62%, respectively.
Misogynic slurs have also proliferated, rising 38%, with uses of words like “whore” and “slut” soaring.
On top of all this, the CCDH notes, the amount of engagement with hateful tweets has risen dramatically. As The Verge explains:
The average number of likes, replies, and retweets on posts with slurs was 13.3 in the weeks leading up to Musk’s Twitter 2.0. Since the takeover, average engagements on hateful content has jumped to 49.5, according to the report.
Meanwhile, according to the Anti-Defamation League, explicit antisemitism on the platform increased 61% in the two weeks after Musk took over the social media platform.
These results don’t take into account the full effect of Musk’s policies–and the firing or resignation of many of those tasked with getting hate off the platform. In particular, they don’t’ take into account Musk’s new “amnesty” policy towards previously banned posters, which has opened the floodgates for some of the worst people in the world to return to Twitter.
In addition to Andrew Anglin, whom I wrote about yesterday, the ADL notes that the platform has now welcomed back such lovely individuals as Richard Spencer, “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler and everyone’s favorite pickup-artist-turned-Christian-reactionary Roosh V. Meanwhile some prominent banned QAnoners have returned to spread their hateful conspiracy theories.
With these and many others returning to Twitter, and more expected in the coming days, it seems more than likely that the hate is only going to get worse.
Unless, of course, you’re listening to Elon Musk, who insists things are getting better and better. Dismissing the CCDH and ADL reports as “utterly false,” he insisted in several recent tweets that hate speech has actually dropped by a third since he began his reign. How this could be possible I don’t know. He hasn’t released the actual data that might back up his claims.
I think I trust the CCDH and ADL’s research over Musk’s.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Wow. Who could have predicted that would happen? I mean, besides basically everyone on all sides
Meanwhile, someone going door to door campaigning for Warnock got shot in the leg through one of those doors.
This is heading toward open civil war, isn’t it?
“It’s not that we hate free speech—it’s that you freed hate speech!”
—Stephen Colbert.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
No, I’m not.
The don’t care about free speech. They just want the freedom to bully and oppress people. They feel oppressed because they cannot repress others.
@SurplusToRequirements Yes, I think we’re headed for a civil war or ongoing chaos at least. I don’t see how we can avoid becoming a failed state, if a large faction can’t accept the outcomes of fair voting. I’ve been watching the Christofascists’ march toward one party rule. People need to stop laughing at them. They mean what they say and some powerful people find it useful.
No cheer from me today, I’m afraid.
@Milotha yup, you described their mindset perfectly. And reminded me of an old favorite quote.
“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?”
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
L. Sprague De Camp
@.45: To quote a good friend of mine, “Well, that’s a big bag of ‘duh.'”
The word “shit” would also work equally as well.
@Mediocrites, Longtime Lurker
Yes, exactly.
L Sprague de Camp hat a keen biting wit that way in his writings.
Quelle surprise
Oh no, I’m so surprised. Not.
Anyone with half a brain was able to deduce that would happen, including mental vegetables like incels and others of their kind. That alone should tell anykne how obvious that was…
@milotha, @Mediocrites, Longtime Lurker
Exactly as you said… that’s why it’s always the right bitching and moaning about free speech rights…
@Do I Have a Name
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that already happened. It’s been literally generations since the infrastructure has been updated or even fixed, the desires of the public haven’t had any material effect on policy at least since Carter was president, and state authorities exist entirely to keep things that way and to hurt lower-status residents. Most of the population lives their lives one bad day from utter disaster, if they haven’t already suffered it. The streets of every population center are full of tent cities and shantytowns. What exactly do you think a failed state looks like from the inside?
“ lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.
This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
A more detailed breakdown is here:
It’s Hell Living In A Failed State
And it’s hell living with White people in denial about it too.
Formally, the term “failed state” is normally reserved for when there’s no effective central government at all anymore, or it’s so totally hamstrung (financially insolvent or besieged by whoever) that there might as well not be. The US’s central government is still functioning; it just doesn’t represent anyone outside a fairly narrow set of interests anymore. I’d classify it as a super-sized banana republic on the verge of turning into a failed state, but not quite there yet. It’s still got some way to fall yet before it’s another Somalia or Syria or former Yugoslavia. (The latter, at least, birthed a litter of at-least-somewhat-functional successor states fairly quickly. Syria has not, to my knowledge, done so yet. Unless they get wrecked by war, the US has some regions, chiefly near the coasts, that are plausibly going to make it through to being such successor states.)
Empires appear to go through four stages (with a zeroth of being some sort of pre-imperial state, before starting to act as an empire). First it expands, absorbing new territories and enriching the core at their expense. The core itself expands, though, with the territories long since absorbed eventually becoming junior partners rather than exploitees. This, of course, is a Ponzi scheme in which the rising standard of living in the core and the growing set of junior partners depends on sucking the wealth out of the expanding periphery. The US did this partly by direct annexation during westward expansion and partly by economic influence backed by military dominance, first over the rest of the Americas (Monroe Doctrine) and later over about half the planet (1945-1970s).
Then comes stagnation, upon running into the limits to growth of the Ponzi scheme. The empire becomes divided into a non-expanding core and set of senior partners, while its periphery is aggressively squeezed dry. The US from the 1970s or so onward fits this: the failures in Korea and Vietnam represented the limit to Ponzi expansion being hit. The standard of living stops rising for anyone except the elites, and begins dropping in the periphery (here, that showed up as the worsening financial situations in Greece and other southern European nations, subordinate to the rest of the EU, in turn subordinate to US interests).
After that comes contraction, as the periphery begins to fragment (Brexit … which is an echo of a previous Brexit, from the western Roman Empire 2000 years earlier) and the wealth pump is turned against the domestic populations even in the core. For the US, that started around 2008 with the financial crisis and the bailout of the banksters at the expense of the general populace. Stagnant standards of living started to move again … downward.
At the end comes collapse. You can’t get blood from a stone. Having exhausted its potential to expand, and then the resources of the periphery, the empire now exhausts the resources of its own core and ceases to be able to keep even its elites from experiencing downward mobility. But those elites control the police and the military, so often the elite fractures into factions who fight violently for one of the other factions to be the one that has to take a pay cut. That can start as increasingly gangsterish conduct in both business arenas and in politics (think J6), including assassinations of politicians (“hang Mike Pence!”) and of rival elites, but often escalates into overt civil war. There are often desperate attempts to stave this off by starting a fresh expansion, which generally meet with failure (Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the use of the Ukraine mess to try to force Russia into being part of the US’s wealth-watershed instead of Putin’s cronies’) but these generally fail for the same reason expansion faltered in the first place.
Once collapse sets in, the state either fragments into civil war factions or successor states, or simply becomes increasingly ineffectual, often through insolvency. The elites rely increasingly on private armies to protect their own interests and fight one another, and having long since hollowed out the rest of the government (e.g. social programs) they finally strip-mine the military defense and surveillance bits, leaving the central government defenseless and in penury in the end.
In the US, I expect this to take the form of strengthening of the states at the federal government’s expense, and eventually the Republicans ceasing to support the defense-industrial complex (which, much as the GOP loves to wax rhapsodic about national security, is increasingly a Democratic Party thing — look at all those CIA Democrats in the House, or Feinstein’s seemingly tenured position as head of the intelligence committee) and working to slash it along with Social Security and food stamps. The big fault line within the elites will likely be between the rich owners of Northrup Grummann and Halliburton and all of them, and the rich owners of everything else, as the former don’t wish to take a pay cut. But they’re outnumbered by the others — while having the big guns on their side. So things could get quite bloody indeed.
So, one way it could go is civil war. One warning sign that this is imminent will be if, with Dems still holding the executive branch, the carriers are brought in close to the US shore. Look also for a political purge in the upper echelons of the Air Force, which is full of Trumpies and white supremacists, and then of the general ranks in that branch, starting at coastal air bases and working inward: the Dem side will want to secure air supremacy in their stronghold regions and try to conquer the interior breadbasket of the Midwest, leaving the Repubs the dry interior West and a sky-high food and water bill after the dust has settled.
Another way it could go is with an increasingly Fortress America Republican party takeover. We got a preview of that under Trump: abandoning “America’s allies” (i.e. the senior partners in empire, like Canada and the EU) to twist in the wind, withdrawing troops from abroad (it was lame duck Trump who ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan, not Biden), and reducing the military to whatever is needed to maintain the integrity of the homeland’s borders plus some deterrence. A near-future Fortress America would abandon its foreign military bases and greatly downsize the military, leaving a portion of each branch sufficient to defend the homeland, plus the nuclear triad Trump was so ignorant about, plus a drone assassination program. Without carrier support as they’d have ceded the high seas, this would need an alternative support: I foresee smaller, cheaper, single-use drones whose main purpose is assassination, dropped via stealthed high-altitude bombers or smuggled in by black ops teams in the back of a truck. There’d be an attempt to have the cake of a much smaller military budget and still eat empire’s benefits too, through using the threat of assassinations (and, as an ultimate backstop, nukes) to extort favorable treatment from other world leaders. Picture Xi Jinping being told he can expand China’s sphere of influence a lot (Taiwan and Japan: directly under the wheels of the bus), but if he puts one Chinese military-issue boot one millimeter over some line somewhere, there’ll be a never-ending series of cheap, one-shot drones after him for the rest of his life and he’ll have to run and hide from the murderbots like John Connor.
We got a foretaste of that style of “foreign policy” too, when Trump droned Qasem Suleimani.
Of course, some will have their sights set a bit higher: both Reagan’s SDI and the plaints of the reactionaries during the Sad Puppies affair in 2015 make clear that there will be a faction bent on getting a real live actual killsat deployed, ala Diamonds Are Forever and Die Another Day, able to zap any Suleimanis who stick their heads out of their bunkers. The problem with that is, it’s a lot cheaper to launch a bit of chaff onto a trajectory to wreck a satellite than it is to put a working satellite into a stable orbit. Putting up a ring of killsats is not going to be compatible with a big reduction of the military budget, let alone replacing the ones that Jinping destroys. Asat launches are detectable though, so they might try to get one or two killsats up and threaten to nuke anyone who shoots them down. Whatever they do, they won’t really be able to have their cake and eat it too: America’s influence will collapse to near zilch outside its own borders, killsat or no killsat, drones or no drones.
The domestic picture is not any rosier than under the civil war scenario: expect pogroms and genocide, and/or the violent resistance needed to limit or stop the same (so, back to civil war, basically). Later, the hollowed government will be unable to prevent secessions and the US will still break up even without a civil war. About the only way the US stays intact is the civil war starts early, the Dem side wins it, and the Dem side wins it decisively, in more or less a repeat of 1865. With the underlying need for some elite group to lose wealth to keep another in its accustomed lifestyle, the aftermath won’t be like 1865, where former slaveowners were compensated and allowed to retain political power in the south. The losing side’s wealthy elites will be expropriated as spoils of war, probably with this being called reparations. The US will totter on for a little while longer, until it can no longer keep the smaller Dem-faction elites from downward mobility, at which point the crisis will reassert itself with a vengeance.
There is one way out, but it’s extremely unlikely: a bona fide socialist revolution that expropriates both sets of elites and manages to hold to its ideals, rather than selling out or being hijacked and ending up in some variation on the theme of Stalinism.
It’s getting worse all the time yet it can’t die fast enough.
Hands up, everyone who didn’t think “well DUH!” upon reading the headline.
(no hands raised)
@Surplus: good thoughts.
Just a reminder, Twitter is not going to die. It will continue to deteriorate, with more outages and hate speech snd data breaches and harassment. But the site will stay up, at least some of the time. It may or may not fade into irrelevance, depending on how many folks keep using it, but maintaining some level of spotty functionality can likely be done for quite a while with the existing skeleton crew.
@Surplus
Fun fact, the US is already defunding European garrisons. Only the “unimportant peripherals” like the environmental program for now, but also schools on base and stuff like that, plus ever increasing drives to save as much money as possible while retaining the same level of services (doesn’t work from what my contacts say, of course, it’s going downhill fast). About the environment, the stance is literally “why should we have to care about the environment of a foreign country? Do it yourself!” (Don’t know, I personally consider it poor form to, when you are a guest somewhere, shit all over your host’s living room and then have the audacity to throw a tantrum when you are reprimanded and told to clean it all up… but that might just be me, I don’t know. ).
This comes from friends or acquaintances working on a US base in Europe. Obviously, I’m not gonna say where.
I’m pretty sure his claim hate speech is down is because he dropped a bunch of stuff from the internal definition of hate speech.
Re-post cos I put this in the wrong thread.
@ surplus
I liked your analysis.
I’ve seen though some plausible arguments that suggest the idea of a sort of ‘cold’ civil war.
The basic premise: The country may be split 50/50ish in terms of party support; and of course there’s all the electoral manipulation that favours red states. But 60% of US wealth is currently concentrated in blue states; and 75% of college graduates live in blue areas.
So the theory is that that wealth and education will continue to concentrate in blue areas. All the big ‘future proof’ industries are moving to those areas. The heavy industries that provided a lot of income in red states will continue to decline as automation, and outsourcing abroad becomes more prevalent.
So there is a growing trend for wealth to accumulate in blue states. They’re more geared up for where the US is heading economically.
Eventually then you’ll end up with two societies; an expanding one that can adapt to the future; and one in decline clinging to an outmoded past.
@Alan
That sounds like the “conservative workers vs. cosmopolitan elite” viewpoint I’ve seen in e.g. the Guardian, which has several major problems – the most obvious is that “workers are conservative” only applies to white workers (and less so than to the white petit bourgeois), but the one nobody talks about is that the actual wealthy elite love to throw their weight behind the most oppressive and outright fascist legislation. The fact is they’re not purely self-interested, they don’t want a healthy and happy workforce – they want to rule, like monarchs of old, over a helpless population, and if given the chance they will happily tear down bastions of human rights like my home state in order to do so.
@Surplus
TBQH I think you’re overoptimistic about the Democratic side’s prospects. If there is mass civil unrest, they will extend a hand of allyship to the far right (as they did during the George Floyd protests). During the early pandemic the Trump admin’s behavior came very close to breaking up the US IMO, and what “saved” it was Democratic governors and the Republican executive finding a common enemy in Black people protesting for their rights. And see also what just happened with the rail worker strikes – we voters moved Heaven and Earth to keep the Republicans from taking power, and now the Democrats once again side with the Republicans.
I figured for a bit that the Biden admin had finally caught on, but it looks to me now like that was just showmanship ahead of the midterms. If there is a full-fledged Republican counterrevolution, I think federal Democrats will try to talk it out, and wind up dead or in prison. As for the military, it didn’t interfere during Trump’s coup and it won’t interfere this time.
We’re in agreement though that some kind of revolution is the only way out. But IDK, I’m just hoping like hell that I and my loved ones survive what’s coming. Considering the whole “Jewish trans person in a wave of rising transphobia and antisemitism” thing I don’t think the prospects look great.
IMO your best bet of survival is to be elsewhere. Canada, say. Maybe farther. New Zealand should be safe so long as they don’t start chucking ICBMs around or provoke a shooting war with China.
Failing that at least hie thee to the bluest neighborhood in the bluest district in the bluest state. That’s probably somewhere in California, and unfortunately it’s probably somewhere with exorbitant housing costs. But those spots are safe from mass organized violence short of a shooting civil war with shelling of the coastal cities or else a full Nazi takeover and Gestapo going door to door. They are not, however, safe from sporadic terrorist acts like the recent Club Q shooting.
I did some further wargaming of possible outcomes of a shooting civil war. In the “Dems get smart and tool up for self-defense, then Repubs try a violent insurrection again” escalation scenario, food is going to be an issue. The blue would be able to blockade the Gulf mouth and Florida coasts, cutting the grey off from foreign assistance (Putin?) and imports (unless they can get help via Mexico or, God forbid, Canada) while importing food while battling it out over the Midwestern heartland. However, the best case scenario ends with the midwest becoming a grinding occupation like Afghanistan, complete with Y’All Qaeda roadside bombs. Food is going to get expensive, and stay that way even after the blues have nominally reconquered the interior breadbasket.
Any Repub takeover leads to not only pogroms but more civil war, or at least a Night of the Long Knives to purge the Catholics and the token minorities (Milo, Kanye, etc.) … worst case is there could be as many as three civil wars, back to back to back, if a) there’s a Repub insurrection that evolves into a shooting war and the greys win round 2, and then b) the white Catholic fascists hold their noses and ally with their non-white counterparts (e.g. all those Cuban Trump supporters) rather than go quietly, after which c) the Catholic side wins America’s shoddy import-remake of the Irish Troubles, then promptly have a straight-up race war. This scenario has the added horror of possibly throwing up a President Kavanaugh along the way.
Civil wars usually draw outside interference. In the scenario where the Dems win the legitimate elections and then face a large-scale insurrection, they’ll have the bulk of international support, but the situation might have a polarizing impact here in Canada. It’s not hard to imagine our own far right in the prairies, sharing a common border with red territory in e.g. the Dakotas, wanting to provide assistance of some sort — and importing guns to use to pull the same shit up here, especially once the Canadian federal government expressly forbids aiding the American insurgents, as it would under this scenario. The Canadian far right caused enough ruckus last year with just trucks; imagine them with guns, and with truck bombs. A US civil war might well destabilize Canada, perhaps fatally.
And all of these scenarios assume the Dems can throw off the influence of their internal fifth column, the mix of secret (or not-so-secret) Republicans, fair-weather friends, and naive “But, but bipartisanship!” types. This might ultimately depend on how their super-rich string-pullers ultimately align. If the white rich align behind expropriating the nonwhite and Jewish rich, then a lot of the Dem politicians will align with the Republicans against the people, and the civil war will be if the non-Protestants put up a real fight after the Repub takeover. If the fracture is instead along lines determined by which industries will get thrown under the bus, the Dem side will end up with the defense industry and military likely largely on its side. The factions will be aligned less by race than by imperialism vs. isolationism in that event. Ultimately it could boil down to how influential some of the newer superrich are, and how they break down both by race and by temperament. A lot of the tech billionaires, despite emerging from deep-blue parts of California, seem to be overtly far right now, which does not bode well.
What should progressive-minded Americans do? I suggest a two-pronged approach. First, a grassroots takeover of the Democratic Party, like the fascists pulled vs. the Republican Party starting with the 2010 Tea Party primaries; and second, organizing independently of the political party system, with an eye to building the capability to pull things like general strikes or, if need be, an insurrection, as well as to create an underground railroad capable of moving vulnerable Americans (like you) to the borders right under the noses of ever-more-hostile police and white cishet busybodies.