Listen to Angelo Carusone explain how Twitter’s disregard for content moderation turns it into a tool for “online to offline harassment”
Carusone: “Twitter then might -- like these other platforms -- become engines of radicalization. And they also provide the tools for online to offline harassment”
Published
Citation From the November 23, 2022, edition of MSNBC's Alex Wagner Tonight
ALICIA MENENDEZ (GUEST HOST): There are people who may say, "Well, I don't have Twitter," right? "I'm not exposed to this." That's not how it works. This all shows up in our day to day life. It shows up in legislation that gets proposed in states we live in. So, talk us through the mechanics of how that happens, and how it is more dangerous in a moment like this.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Right. When you -- when this kind of content gets left up, I think that sometimes people say, "Well, sticks and stones will never break my bones." You know, why do we care about harmful content, you know, especially when it's targeted towards marginalized individuals for this type of disinformation. Why should it matter? What's the effect?
Okay, it's more than hurt feelings, and I think people need to understand that because the more you leave this content up -- what Twitter knows, what all of these platforms know -- is how long individuals stay on that content, how much they interact with similar types of content, and it begins to build profiles and lookalikes. And what it starts to do is say, "Hey, you're somebody that's maybe never thought about this issue before, maybe you don't -- you've never expressed any indication of anti-trans violence. But perhaps based on all of these other factors, you might be really interested in this. You know, you're already kind of bigoted, you're already kind of racist, would you also like to hate trans people? Here's some lies and misinformation about what they're doing at your local school."
And that's the sort of -- the problem with this idea that if you don't use Twitter, it doesn't affect you, because it does. Because Twitter then might -- like these other platforms -- become engines of radicalization. And they also provide the tools for online to offline harassment.
Because we're keeping in mind that part of what Elon Musk wants to do is build more capabilities on Twitter for closed organizing like we have on Telegram and these other platforms. So, he wants to make it a sort of a one stop shop for both hate, harassment, abuse, and also off line action. And that's where it starts to affect everybody, even if they don't care about Twitter.