Twitter Becomes the Subject of Coordinated Trolling Following Elon Musk Acquisition

Some people wanted Twitter to look bad when it came to its policies.

Elon Musk's controversial acquisition of Twitter took the world by storm last week. Following this takeover, the social media platform immediately removed nearly 1,500 accounts linked to trolling.

Twitter Trolling Campaign Intensifies

Twitter Becomes the Subject of Coordinated Trolling Following Elon Musk Acquisition
Twitter has recently deleted about 1,500 accounts that promote hateful conduct on the platform. Souvik Banerjee from Unsplash

Recently, Twitter's head of safety and security, Yoel Roth, said that more than 1,500 Twitter accounts had been deleted on the microblogging site. The said accounts are believed to be involved in a coordinated trolling attack on the platform.

Roth noticed that there was an increase in the number of bot accounts that wanted to make Twitter look worse when it came to its policies.

Before that, Twitter is already aware of the spread of hateful content on the site. To intensify this battle against trolls, the platform decided to mass remove thousands of bot accounts used by anonymous trolls.

According to Engadget, Roth highlighted that the 1,500 accounts do not equate to 1,500 users. Possibly, some of them are used by a single person.

Additionally, Roth tweeted that many of them were "repeat bad actors," which means that some accounts are already used all over again to spread hate across the platform.

Twitter is Revamping Policies Against Harmful Tweets

Aside from purging bot accounts for anti-trolling purposes, Roth also pointed out that Twitter is now improving its policies regarding malicious tweets.

"Because bystanders don't always have full context, we have a higher bar for bystander reports in order to find a violation," he said.

Furthermore, Roth said that the platform would continue to unveil more policies soon. However, as Bloomberg reported, it would be up to the Twitter staff if the policies will be implemented in the next few days.

The bad news about this is that some Twitter employees said that their accounts were locked out, particularly those used for content moderation.

The report also includes that the majority of Twitter's Trust and Safety organization members are not capable of punishing accounts that violate the policies linked to hate speech and misinformation.

The account restriction could be Twitter's response that the new owner is already live among the staff members. With that being said, no new changes will be rolled out by the staff members after the recent acquisition.

Meanwhile, Yahoo reports that new Twitter owner Elon posted a tweet about a conspiracy theory. The particular post is all about the incident involving US Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his husband.

However, Twitter citizens quickly noticed that the post was deleted after some minutes. At that time, the tweet had already garnered more than 110,000 likes.

The tweet could no longer be seen on the platform as of Sunday afternoon, Oct. 30.

When AFP asked Twitter about the deleted post, the communications department did not respond.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

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