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%.
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.”
Fabricio Bloisi, chief executive officer of Prosus NV, during an interview in London, UK, on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. Bloisi took the reins of South Africa’s Naspers Ltd. and its investment arm Prosus NV in July with a plan to double the value of the 110-year-old group within the next four years.
Jose Sarmento Matos | Bloomberg | Getty Images
India will produce a $100 billion tech company in the coming years, the CEO of Prosus told CNBC on Monday, as the firm bets on the country for its next big investment win.
Prosus, which is majority owned by South African company Naspers, is one of the biggest tech investors in the world.
The company is hoping it can replicate the success it saw with its return on Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent. Prosus’ parent company Naspers bought a near 50% holding in Tencent back in 2001 for around $32 million. That early stake in Tencent is now worth billions of dollars, with the WeChat operator valued at nearly $600 billion as of Monday.
“The companies there [in India] are still small, our investment there is around $10 billion, as it was in China 14 years ago,” Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi told CNBC.
“What’s the learning? We believe it’s going to be, not a $20 billion company, but a $100 billion company, maybe [a] half a trillion dollar company in India. So we are not investing there to sell next month.”
Prosus has invested in some of the buzziest tech firms in India, including payments service PayU and e-commerce company Meesho. Prosus also owns just under 25% of food delivery firm Swiggy, which went public in November.
Bloisi said listing Prosus’ India investments are a key part of its strategy. He added that he expects five Indian companies that Prosus is invested in to carry out an initial public offering this year.
“I think this is very good for India, because we have the local markets here investing in the local companies. This was critical for U.S., this was critical for China. I think if India can greater strong local markets investing in tech, it’s going to be amazing for India,” Bloisi said.
Prosus has also been targeting big investments in Europe and the Latin America.
The company’s playbook revolves around the idea of ecosystems surrounding services, which Tencent managed to execute in China. Tencent runs China’s biggest messaging app called WeChat, which integrates features like payments and the ability to hail taxis or order food.
“We believe that we have ecosystems, just like we have in China in the U.S., like Microsoft or Uber or Google or Meta. They’re not just one product. They have one product that enables cross-sell and technology shared between many other adjacencies. That’s what we are doing,” Bloisi said.
In Latin America, Prosus has stakes in Brazilian food delivery firm iFood, online travel firm Despegar and online marketplace OLX Brasil.
Bloisi said food delivery and payments are the foundation of their investments, followed by areas like e-commerce and experiences such as travel.
“That’s the kind of ecosystem we believe. We learned that from China, we are doing that in that in Latin America right now, very, very successfully,” Bloisi said.
In the meantime, Prosus this year made a proposal to acquire European food delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway.com in an all-cash deal worth around 4.1 billion euros ($4.7 billion).
Bloisi said Prosus on Monday officially began proceedings to seek permission from the European Commission to approve the deal. The Prosus CEO said he was “optimistic” that the European regulators will “approve it quickly.”
Returns on Amazon are free and easy for shoppers, but they’re risky and expensive for the small businesses that sell a majority of the goods on the world’s biggest e-commerce site. Returns have driven some sellers to exit the popular Fulfillment by Amazon program, while others told CNBC they’d like to leave the platform altogether.
At the heart of the problem is a big rise in returns fraud, which has led to customers mistakenly receiving used products when they ordered something new. In two particularly egregious examples involving baby products described to CNBC, Amazon sent customers used diapers and a chiller with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside.
“I really don’t think that consumers understand how many small businesses are on Amazon and how their return habits affect small businesses and families like mine,” said Rachelle Baron, owner of Beau and Belle Littles, which sells reusable swim diapers on Amazon.
Baron said her business tanked after a return incident with Amazon. The e-commerce platform shipped soiled swim diapers to customers after the used baby products had been returned to Amazon, Baron said.
“There was actually two diapers that were sent out that were poopy,” she said.
In 2024, nearly 14% of all U.S. retailreturns were fraudulent, up from 5% in 2018, according to a report by the National Retail Federation. In total, the report found that returns cost retailers $890 billion in 2024.
Amazon started charging sellers in its fulfillment program (FBA) a new fee in June 2024 for items that exceed certain return rate thresholds. Sellers who sign up for FBA rely on Amazon for logistics, including shipping, packing and returns.
In September, a couple months after the fee went into effect, e-commerce group Helium 10 saw return rates for U.S. Amazon sellers drop nearly 5%.
“It’s forcing the seller to have higher quality listings and higher quality products,” said Helium 10 General Manager Zoe Lu.
Amazon has alsostarted adding a warning label to some “frequently returned items,” which could be contributing to the dip.
Rising prices
However, the new fee may also be leading to rising prices.
One survey by e-commerce analysis company SmartScout found that 65% of sellers said they raised prices in 2024 directly because of Amazon fee changes. Other sellers told CNBC returns fraud is the reason they’ve raised prices.
In total, CNBC talked to seven Amazon sellers to find out how they’re handling the rising cost of returns.
“We’re running at about just over 1% net profit on Amazon, totally due to fraud and return abuse,” said Lorie Corlett, who sells Sterling Spectrum protective cases for hot wheels. She said her return rate is 4% on Amazon and only 1% on other marketplaces like Walmart. “It’s really Amazon that’s accountable at the end of the day. People would stop doing it if Amazon held them accountable.”
Amazon told CNBC it has no tolerance for fraudulent returns and that it takes action against some scammers. Those measures include denying refunds and requiring customer identity verification.
Mike Jelliff sells professional music gear through his GeekStands brand on Amazon and eight other marketplaces. He said his return rate on Amazon is three times higher than the average he sees elsewhere.
“On eBay, we’re allowed to block specific customers out,” Jelliff said. “But on Amazon, that customer is still allowed to repurchase from us.”
Jelliff showed CNBC the system of about 40 cameras he’s installed in his Tyler, Texas, warehouse to track every outgoing item, incoming return and unboxing. He uses the images when filing appeals with Amazon, including when customers request refunds claiming they never receive an item. He keeps a blacklist of repeat offenders who commit this kind of fraud and those who return used and damaged items, which become a total loss for him.
Amazon has made some improvements to its returns process, said Jelliff, who doesn’t rely on FBA. This includes Amazon allowing small businesses to make multiple appeals when fighting a fraudulent return. Amazon has also let Jelliff opt-out of automatic return labels for items above $100 starting in 2023, and his return rate has been dropping since.
Mike Jelliff at his GeekStands warehouse in Tyler, Texas, on June 6, 2025. Jelliff sees three times more returns of his professional music gear on Amazon, compared to the average on other marketplaces like eBay and Walmart.
Jacob Schatz
Why returns are destroyed
Figuring out which returns are fraudulent and which are ready for re-sale is labor-intensive and item specific, experts said. That creates plenty of room for error.
“Because it’s such a large operation, things are missed,” said Lu of Helium 10. “I think they’re probably missed on the margins, but these stories are very impactful because it is such a reckoning for the brand.”
Ceres Chill founder Lisa Myers, who once relied on Amazon to handle returns for her business as part of FBA, has one of these stories.
In 2023, Amazon sent one of Ceres Chill’s products to a customer with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside, said Myers, adding that the customer wrote a review saying, “she will never forget that smell.”
“To have something, and I don’t mean to be dramatic, but dangerous, somebody else’s bodily fluids in your kitchen rotting in something that you had intended to use for your child is unacceptable,” Myers said. “That’s the moment I broke down crying and just sat down and thought, I have no idea how this could have happened.”
Myers said she left FBA after the incident, leaving behind benefits like having her products labeled with Amazon’s Prime badge.
“It hurts our business to not participate in Fulfilled by Amazon,” Myers said.“It’s just we’re not willing to, we will never put profit over the safety and, frankly, mental health of our customers.”
Instead, Myers outsources all her returns to baby resell specialist Goodbuy Gear, which is on track to re-sell 200,000 returned baby products this year.
Re-selling responsibly
Kristin Langenfeld started GoodBuy Gear when she was a new mom struggling to find a good quality, used jogging stroller.
“We’ve spent the last nine years building out a database that has all of the products and the variations, the common issues, the recalls,” Langenfeld said. “For some of these, there’s 40 points that we inspect on the item itself, and it’s really complicated.”
Langenfeld showed CNBC the process at her warehouse in Malvern, Pennsylvania, where each item is inspected for about 15 minutes and is typically handled by at least four employees. The resource intensive process is paying off. She says 33 new sellers signed up in 2024, three times more than the previous year. And with business growing 50% year-over-year, she’s upgrading to a bigger warehouse in Columbus, Ohio.
She was inspired to handle returns after visiting a major retailer’s returns warehouse five years ago.
“Taped on the floor were signs that said ‘incinerate,’ ‘destroy,'” she said.
Returns generated an estimated 29 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2024, and 9.8 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills, according to reverse logistics software provider Optoro.
Amazon has faced criticism for destroying millions of pounds of unused products. In 2022, Amazon told CNBC it was “working towards a goal of zero product disposal,” but wouldn’t give a timeline for that ambition. Three years later, that goal is still in the works, with Amazon telling CNBC in a statement, “The vast majority of returns are resold as new or used, returned to selling partners, liquidated, or donated.”
In 2020, Amazon added two new options for sellers to re-home returns. “Grade and Resell” allows all U.S. FBA sellers to have Amazon rate the return and mark it as “used” before re-selling it. FBA Liquidation allows sellers to recoup some losses by offloading palettes of goods for re-sale on the secondary market through liquidation partners like Liquidity Services.
There’s also an FBA Donations program that’s been around since 2019, allowing sellers to automatically offer eligible overstock and returns to charity groups through the non-profit Good360. Amazon told CNBC these seller programs give a second life to more than 300 million items a year.
For shoppers wanting to keep returns from incineration or landfills, Amazon also has options.
Amazon Resale has used and open-box goods, Amazon Renewed sells refurbished items and Amazon Outlet sells overstock. Daily deal site Woot!, bought by Amazon for $110 million in 2010, also sells scratched and dented items. Customers can also trade in certain electronics, like Amazon devices, phones and tablets, for Amazon gift cards or send them to the company’s certified recycler.
“I hope the change that we’re able to make as a country is that we stop making crap,” Langenfeld said. “We should make high quality products that are meant for resale.”
Meta approached artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI about a potential takeover bid before ultimately investing $14.3 billion into Scale AI, CNBC confirmed on Friday.
The two companies did not finalize a deal, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.
One person familiar with the talks said it was “mutually dissolved,” while another person familiar with the matter said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal.
Bloomberg earlier reported the talks between Meta and Perplexity. Perplexity declined to comment. Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Meta’s attempt to purchase Perplexity serves as the latest example of Mark Zuckerberg‘s aggressive push to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, and he is going to extreme lengths to hire top AI talent, as CNBC has previously reported.
Read more CNBC reporting on AI
Meta now has a 49% stake in Scale after its multibillion-dollar investment, though the social media company will not have any voting power. Scale AI’s founder Alexandr Wang, along with a small number of other Scale employees, will join Meta as part of the agreement.
Earlier this year, Meta also tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, which was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April, as CNBC reported on Thursday.
Daniel Gross, the CEO of Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman are joining Meta’s AI efforts, where they will work on products under Wang. Gross runs a venture capital firm with Friedman called NFDG, their combined initials, and Meta will get a stake in the firm.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the latest episode of the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother, that Meta had tried to poach OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million with even larger annual compensation packages.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the podcast. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
