Twitter owner Elon Musk has accused a BBC reporter of lying during an interview in a row over whether incidents of hate speech are increasing on the social network. The Mail has the story.
Mr. Musk was asked by U.S. tech journalist James Clayton how he would respond to claims that there are not enough staff at Twitter to police rising hateful content.
But he challenged the reporter to give him examples of such content – and when Mr. Clayton declined to do so, Mr. Musk accused him of spreading a “false” claim.
During a wide-ranging discussion at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, Mr. Musk also said that Twitter had “four months to live” when he bought the firm. He insisted it needed to cut costs to save it from bankruptcy and confirmed that about 80% of its staff have been axed since he took over last October.
And, explaining the last-minute nature of the interview – for which Mr. Clayton is said to have had only 20 minutes to prepare – Mr Musk later tweeted: “I said BBC could come Twitter, then, to my surprise, a reporter shows up.” Mr. Musk also described the interview as “penetrating deep and hard”.
Speaking during the chat, Mr. Clayton asked Mr. Musk: “We’ve spoken to people very recently who were involved in moderation and they just say there’s not enough people to police this stuff, particularly around hate speech in the company. Is that something that you want to address?”
Mr. Musk replied: “What hate speech are you talking about? I mean, you use Twitter. Do you see a rise in hate speech? Just a personal anecdote? I don’t.”
And Mr. Clayton said: “Personally, for you, I would say I get more of that kind of content, yeah, personally. But I’m not going to talk for the rest of Twitter.”
Mr. Musk then asked him to “describe a hateful thing”, and Mr. Clayton said: “Well, yeah, you know, content that would solicit a reaction, something that is slightly racist, slightly sexist.”
Mr. Musk then asked Mr. Clayton whether he thinks that “if something is slightly sexist it should be banned”. Mr. Clayton denied this was the case, but Mr. Musk pressed him to give specific examples.
Mr. Clayton then said: “Honestly, I don’t… I don’t actually use that feed anymore because I just don’t particularly like it. And actually a lot of people are quite similar. I only look at my followers.”
The Twitter owner said: “I’m asking for one example and you can’t give a single one…. I say sir that you don’t know what you are talking about. You cannot give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet you claimed that hateful content was high. That is false, you just lied.”
But Mr. Clayton said there were “many organisations” that would say hateful posts on Twitter were on the rise, such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, before moving on to discuss Covid misinformation.
MailOnline contacted the BBC to establish whether it will be responding to Mr. Musk’s claims that Mr. Clayton lied, but a spokesman said: “We won’t be commenting on this.”
Today, Mr. Musk retweeted a post by user @TexasLindsay_ which said he had “shut down this pro-censorship BBC reporter and left him scrambling on how to justify his own questions on misinformation and the supposed rise in hate speech”. Above this post, Mr. Musk wrote: “Penetrating deep & hard with @BBC.”
Worth reading in full.
Musk also accused the BBC of covering up the side effects of Covid vaccinations and spreading misinformation about masks. He said:
Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and the side effects of vaccinations. And not reporting on that at all? And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change editorial policy?
The BBC’s own special ‘Disinformation Correspondent’ Marianna Spring has been carrying on some kind of weird vendetta against Musk by writing a string of articles mainly about herself and citing some dubious data supposedly showing that she has been subject to increased abuse since Musk took over, but which in fact mainly show she gets more negative tweets when she makes controversial BBC programmes.
So Musk has good cause to criticise the BBC for its coverage of Twitter.
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