In an interview, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that a BBC reporter confused him about how hate speech was spreading on the site.
In a recent conversation, US technology writer James Clayton asked Mr. Musk how the company would respond to criticism that it doesn’t have the means to fight the growing amount of hate speech on the platform.
He did, however, ask the author to give him some examples. Musk said Clayton was sharing “false information,” but Clayton was not doing this.
When Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October of last year, he is said to have told employees in a long meeting in San Francisco that the company had “four months to live” and that as a result, 80% of the staff had been fired.
The interview was set up so quickly that Mr. Clayton only had 20 minutes to get ready. Later, Mr. Musk tweeted, “I said BBC could come to Twitter, and then, to my surprise, a reporter showed up.” He also said that the speech “went deep and hit hard.”
“Do you want to talk about that?” Clayton asked Musk. We just talked to the people in charge of screening, and they told us that there aren’t enough people to keep an eye out for hate speech in the business.
“What do you mean by hate speech?” asked Musk.Does Twitter have more hate speech now than it did before? This is a story about my life. I don’t.
“Well, in your case, I’d say I get more of that kind of information,” Mr. Clayton said. I will no longer use Twitter, though.
Then Mr. Musk told him to “describe something hateful.” Mr. Clayton said, “Well, you know, content that would get a reaction, like something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist.”
Musk then asked Clayton if he thought that even a little bit of racism should be illegal. Mr. Clayton said that wasn’t true, but Mr. Musk demanded that he give more details.
After thinking for a while, Mr. Clayton said, “To be honest, I don’t. I stopped getting the feed because I didn’t like reading it. It’s probably safe to think that a lot of other people agree with him. I care about only those who follow me.
He said, “I say to you, sir, that you don’t know what you’re talking about,” when Twitter’s CEO didn’t give an example.
I told him, “You can’t show me even one tweet that says something hateful.” What he said was, “You just made up a lie.”
Mr. Clayton said, while talking about Covid myths, that “many organizations,” like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, are seeing more angry posts on social media.
When MailOnline asked the BBC for a statement, a spokesperson said, “We won’t be saying anything about this.” Musk says that Clayton made the whole thing up.
Mr. Musk shared a tweet from @TexasLindsay that said Mr. Musk “shut down this pro-censorship BBC reporter and left him scrambling to justify his own questions on misinformation and the supposed rise in hate speech.” Mr. Musk wrote in the post’s heading, “Penetrating deep and hard with @BBC.”