Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May 16th, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
The sudden departure of Twitter executives tasked with content moderation and brand safety has left the company more vulnerable than ever to hate speech.
On Thursday, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned from the company. Following Irwin’s departure, the company’s head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, reportedlyleft, as did Maie Aiyed, a program manager who worked on brand safety partnerships.
It’s been just over seven months since Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, an investment that’s so far has been a giant money loser. Musk has dramatically downsized the company’s workforce and rolled back policies that restricted what kind of content could circulate. In response, numerous brands suspended or decreased their advertising spending, as several civil rights groups have documented.
Twitter, under Musk, is the fourth most-hated brand in the U.S. according to the 2023 Axios Harris reputation rankings.
The controversy surrounding Musk’s control of Twitter continues to build.
This week, Musk said it’s not against Twitter’s terms of service to misgender trans people on the platform. He said doing so is merely “rude” but not illegal.” LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers dispute his position, claiming it invites bullying of trans people. On Friday, Musk boosted a video on Twitter that was deemed transphobic by these groups.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations expressed dismay to NBC News over Musk’s decision, saying the company’s new policies will lead to an uptick in anti-trans hate speech and online abuse.
Although Musk recently hired former NBC Universal global advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to succeed him as CEO, it’s unclear how the new boss will assuage advertisers’ concerns regarding racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and homophobic content in light of the recent departures and Musk’s ongoing role as majority owner and technology chief.
Even before the latest high-profile exits, Musk had been reducing the number of workers tasked with safety and content moderation as part of the company’s widespread layoffs. He eliminated the entire AI ethics team, which was responsible for ensuring that harmful content wasn’t being algorithmically recommended to users.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has recently downplayed concerns about the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter. He claimed during a Wall Street Journal event that since he took over the company in October, hate speech on the platform has declined, and that Twitter has slashed “spam, scams and bots” by “at least 90%.”
Experts and ad industry insiders told CNBC that there’s no evidence to support those claims. Some say Twitter is actively impeding independent researchers who are attempting to track such metrics.
Twitter didn’t provide a comment for this story.
The state of hate speech on Twitter
In a paper published in April that will be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Web and Social Media in Cyprus, researchers from Oregon State, University of Southern California, and other institutions showed that hate speech has increased since Musk bought Twitter.
The authors wrote that the accounts known for posts containing hateful content and slurs targeting Blacks, Asians, LGTBQ groups and others increased such tweeting “dramatically following Musk’s takeover” and do not show signs of slowing down. They found that Twitter hasn’t made progress on bots, which have remained as prevalent and active on Twitter as they were prior to Musk’s tenure.
Musk previously indicated that Twitter’s recommendation algorithms surface less offensive content to people who don’t want to see it.
Keith Burghardt, one of the authors of the paper and a computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, told CNBC that the deluge of hate speech and other explicit content correlates to the reduction of people working on trust and safety issues and the relaxed content moderation policies.
Musk also said at the WSJ event that “most advertisers” had come back to Twitter.
Louis Jones, a long-time media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said it’s not clear how many advertisers have resumed spending but that “many advertisers remain on pause, as Twitter has limited reach compared to some other platforms.”
Jones said many advertisers are waiting to see how levels of “toxicity” and hate speech on Twitter change as the site appears to slant towards more right-wing users and as U.S. elections approach. He said one big challenge for brands is that Musk and Twitter haven’t made clear what they count in their measurements assessing hate speech, spam, scams and bots.
Researchers are calling on Musk to provide data to back up his recent claims.
“More data is critical to really understand whether there is a continuous decrease in either hate speech or bots,” Burghardt said. “That again emphasizes the need for greater transparency and for academics to have a freely available data.”
Show us the data
Getting that data is becoming harder.
Twitter recently started charging companies for access to its application programing interface (API), which allows them to incorporate and analyze Twitter data. The lowest-paid tier costs $42,000 for 50 million tweets.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate nonprofit, said that because researchers now have “to pay a fortune” to access the API, they’re having to rely on other potential routes to the data.
“Twitter under Elon Musk has been more opaque,” Ahmed said.
He added that Twitter’s search function is less effective than in the past and that view counts, as seen on certain tweets, can suddenly change, making them unstable to use.
“We no longer have any confidence in the accuracy of the data,” Ahmed said.
The CCDH analyzed a series of tweets from the beginning of 2022 through February 28, 2023. It released a report in March analyzing over 1.7 million tweets collected using a data-scraping tool and Twitter’s search function and discovered that tweets mentioning the hateful “grooming” narrative have risen 119% since Musk took over.
That refers to “the false and hateful lie” that the LGBTQ+ community grooms children. The CCDH found that a small number of popular Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers have been driving the “hateful ‘grooming’ narrative online.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, continues to find anti-Semitic posts on Twitter. The group recently conducted its 2023 study of digital terrorism and hate on social platforms and graded Twitter a D-, putting it on par with Russia’s VK as the worst in the world for large social networks.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action agenda at the center, called on Musk to meet with him to discuss the rise of hate speech on Twitter. He said he has yet to receive a response.
“They need to look at it seriously,” Cooper said. If they don’t, he said, lawmakers are going to be called upon to “do something about it.”
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta shares hit a record high on Monday, underscoring investor interest in the company’s new AI superintelligence group.
The company’s shares reached $747.90 during midday trading, topping Meta’s previous stock market record in February when it began laying off the 5% of its workforce that it deemed “low performers.”
Meta joins Microsoft and Nvidia among tech megacaps that have reached new highs of late, all closing at records Monday. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla remain below their all-time highs reached late last year or early this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an AI hiring blitz amid fierce competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Earlier in June, Meta said it would hire Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into the executive’s data labeling and annotation startup.
The social media company also hired Nat Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, the chief of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup with a valuation of $32 billion, CNBC reported on June 19. Meta’s attempts to buy Safe Superintelligence were rebuffed by the startup’s founder and AI expert Ilya Sutskever, the report noted.
Wang and Friedman are the leaders of Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs, tasked with overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence foundation models, projects and research, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The term superintelligence refers to technology that exceeds human capability.
Bloomberg News first reported about the new superintelligence unit.
Meta has also snatched AI researchers from OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said during a podcast that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, spoke about the social media company’s AI hiring spree during a June 20 interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime,” saying that the talent market is “really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive.”
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation stock soared about 12% as the flying air taxi maker got closer to launching a service in the United Arab Emirates.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, company said Monday that it delivered its first aircraft to the UAE and has completed piloted flight tests as it readies for a 2026 launch in the region.
“Our flights and operational footprint in Dubai are a monumental step toward weaving air taxi services into the fabric of daily life worldwide,” said founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt in a release. He called the Middle East nation a “launchpad for a global revolution in how we move.”
Joby’s planned launch in the UAE was announced in February 2024 as part of an agreement with Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority. The deal included exclusive rights to conduct air taxi service in Dubai for six years.
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As part of the project, Joby said in November that it began building one vertiport at Dubai International Airport, with three additional locations slated for Palm Jumeirah and Dubai’s downtown and marina. Joby also announced an air taxi agreement with three Abu Dhabi government departments in 2024.
The California-based company has made other expansion moves in the Middle East. Shares jumped earlier this month after Saudi Arabian firm Abdul Latif Jameel announced a roughly $1 billion investment for up to 300 eVTOLs. The firm participated in Joby’s Series C funding round.
Joby shares have surged more than 32% this year, swelling its market capitalization to over $9 billion.
Demand for air taxis, which take off and land similar to helicopters, has gained momentum in recent years. The service faces regulatory and safety hurdles but has been lauded for its ability to cut traffic congestion and slash emissions.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included a pilot program for testing electric air taxis.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.
CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”
The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.