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Twitter now allows "non-toxic slurs" as long as the slurs are not hate speech [1]
['Thom Dunn']
Date: 2023-03-24
This week, in Elon Musk's continuing mission to turn the entire world into an electrified dystopian hellscape, Twitter Safety has introduced a new concept called "non-toxic slurs." Unlike hate speech, which is objectively bad, these non-toxic slurs are neither hateful, nor acts of speech, but rather, umm, derogatory insults aimed at a particular group of people, I guess. Which is different, you see. Because they're non-toxic.
Our focal metric is hate speech impressions, not the number of Tweets containing slurs.
Most slur usage is not hate speech, but when it is, we work to reduce its reach. Sprinklr's analysis found that hate speech receives 67% fewer impressions per Tweet than non-toxic slur Tweets — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) March 21, 2023
If you actually want to know more specifics, this distinction is supposedly based on an analysis from Sprinklr, a company specializing in customer experience management. That analysis was, in turn, based on Twitter data that included a list of 300 English-language slurs and the 550,000 English-language tweets that used those words between January and February 2023. The company explains:
Sprinklr's new toxicity model analyzes data and categorizes content as "toxic" if it is used to demean an individual, attack a protected category or dehumanize marginalized groups. Integrating factors such as reclaimed language and context allowed our model to eliminate false positives and negatives as well. The model uses AI to determine intent and context around the flagged keywords, to help brands understand what is really toxic.
The Sprinklr study concluded that tweets containing slurs typically received fewer impressions, and that roughly 85% of the tweets using those slurs were using them as "in non-toxic contexts like reclaimed speech or casual greetings."
The Muskrat himself explained why this apparently matters:
This is a critical distinction. It's obviously trivial for a single person to create 10k bot accounts on one computer, each of which is tweeting slurs that are written to avoid text string detection. What matters is whether those tweets are actually shown to real users. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2023
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