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Twitter is a more dangerous social platform for LGBTQ users now than it was a year ago, according to a new survey from LGBTQ+ rights organization GLAAD.

The group’s third annual Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) report finds a pullback and inconsistent enforcement of company policies addressing anti-LGBTQ online hate speech.

“Dehumanizing anti-LGBTQ content on social media such as misinformation and hate have an outsized impact on real-world violence and harmful anti-LGBTQ legislation,” said GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ellis.

“Social media platforms too often fail at enforcing their own policies regarding such content,” she added.

GLAAD’s SMSI Platform Scorecard evaluates LGBTQ safety, privacy and expression on five major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter — based on 12 LGBTQ-specific indicators. These indicators include explicit protections from hate and harassment for LGBTQ users, offering gender pronoun options on profiles, and prohibiting ads that could be harmful and/or discriminatory to LGBTQ people.

Regular CNBC guest and New York Magazine Editor at Large Kara Swisher sits on GLAAD’s SMSI advisory committee of more than a dozen industry experts.

Not just Twitter

Twitter is not alone. The other four major social media platforms also received low scores on the SMSI scorecard, with Facebook garnering a 61% and TikTok posting a 57% out of a possible 100%. See below for a breakdown of the results.

GLAAD found that the platforms continue to fall short at establishing and enforcing safeguards meant to protect LGBTQ users from hate speech. Lack of transparency around user data also remains a privacy concern.

Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, told CNBC the platform’s policies prohibit content that promotes violence or hatred against the LGBTQ+ community: “Over the last few years, we’ve made significant progress in our ability to quickly remove this content from our platform and prominently surface authoritative sources in search results and recommendations.”

TikTok and Meta both told CNBC their respective platforms remain committed to protecting the LGBTQ+ community.

“We’re proud to have strong policies aimed at protecting LGBTQ+ individuals from harassment and hate speech, including misgendering and deadnaming, and we’re always looking to strengthen our approach, informed both by our community and the advice of experts, such as GLAAD,” said a TikTok spokesperson.

A Meta spokesperson said the company is open to collaboration to create a safer platform for all users: “We engage with civil society organizations around the world in our work to design policies and create tools that foster a safe online environment.”

Of the five major platforms included in this study, Twitter was the only one with scores that declined from last year. Its score slipped to 33% from 44.7%.

The dip comes in part as a result of the company’s removal of transgender user protections in April 2023.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy previously stated that Twitter prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” The second line was removed in April, according to archived versions of the page from the Wayback Machine dated two months prior.

Twitter sent a poop emoji in response to an emailed request for comment. The company did not immediately respond to a direct message seeking comment via Twitter.

Elon Musk took over as owner and CEO of the social platform in October 2022. Musk told CNBC’s David Faber in May that as an “aspirational” free speech absolutist, he defends a “community notes” model to protect users on the platform.

“My overall kind of vision for actual Twitter is to be a cybernetic collective mind for humanity,” said Musk. “You can think of community notes as like an error correction on information in the network. And the effect of community notes is actually bigger than it would seem. It’s bigger than the number of notes because if somebody knows that they’re going to get noted they are less likely to say something that is false, because it’s embarrassing to get community noted.”

The debate over a community notes approach is that it leaves the burden on those affected by hate speech to report harmful posts. GLAAD says this approach causes “sheer traumatic psychological impact of being relentlessly exposed to slurs and hateful conduct.”

A dangerous environment

So far in 2023, GLAAD has documented more than 160 acts or threats of violence at LGBTQ events. GLAAD’s recent Accelerating Acceptance report found that 86% of non-LGBTQ Americans agree that exposure to online hate content leads to real-world violence.

“There is an urgent need for effective regulatory oversight of the tech industry — and especially social media companies — with the goal of protecting LGBTQ people, and all people,” said GLAAD’s senior director of social media safety, Jenni Olson.

GLAAD is calling on social media platforms to take responsibility for ineffective policies, products and algorithms that create a dangerous environment for LGBTQ users, adding that actions from the platforms are limited because “enragement leads to profitable engagement.”

Olson added that social media industry leaders “continue to prioritize corporate profits over the public interest.”

“As many of the companies behind these platforms recognize Pride month,” said Ellis. “They should recognize their roles in creating a dangerous environment for LGBTQ Americans and urgently take meaningful action.”

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.

Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.

This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.

The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all. 

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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Musk’s xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok’s ‘horrific’ antisemitic posts

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Musk's xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok's 'horrific' antisemitic posts

The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.

“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.

X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.

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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.

“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.

Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”

xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.

Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.

CNBC’s April Roach contributed to this article.

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