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Observers fear that the World Cup will show the limits of Twitter in the Elon Musk era: With a reduced staff and complete freedom of expression, they expect an overflow of hate and repeated collapses.
On the one hand, there is the Twitter optimism of Elon Musk, and on the other, the army of birds of bad omen on Twitter. The Tesla CEO and new head of the microblogging site said on Sunday, November 20, that “you have to follow the World Cup on Twitter to get the best possible coverage (of the event).” Observers and former site employees fear competition will bring Twitter to its knees and lead to an unprecedented wave of racist and hateful messages.
For Elon Musk, what is at stake is the World Cup, which will be held from November 20 to December 18 in Qatar. The contest is one of the most followed events on social networks and will be a test run for the new Twitter, at a time of drastic staff cuts.
Soccer was, in 2021, the most commented sport on Twitter, well ahead of basketball, American football and baseball combined, recalled Twitter in a statement at the end of October… a few days before almost the entire communication team was fired by Elon Musk.
Twitter and the lucrative football business
So is the credibility of your new acquisition, especially in the eyes of advertisers. The 2018 World Cup alone represented a 5% increase in advertising revenue for an entire quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So it’s not a bump in the road. “The teams have been working for several weeks to prepare everything for the World Cup,” he said. Ella Irwinvice president of Twitter in charge of the security of the venue, shortly before the start of the first match of the World Cup between Qatar and Ecuador.
In this way, he wanted to reassure football fans who were surprised by Elon Musk’s decision to close the Twitter offices during the weekend of November 20, after a wave of resignations of group employees.
A user asked: “Do you know that the World Cup starts on the 20th?”, clearly doubting the ability of the social network to offer “the best possible coverage” if the offices were closed.
This exchange with Ella Irwin illustrates the extent to which observers fear Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter will weaken the platform at a time when the World of controversy begins.
Between massive layoffs and resignations, the Twitter workforce – more than 7,500 employees before the arrival of Elon Musk – has been reduced “by half in a matter of weeks,” says the British newspaper The Guardian. Entire teams have sometimes disappeared: “An engineer told us his department had gone from 75 people… to three,” says the Wall Street Journal, in an investigation devoted to Elon Musk’s Twitter and World Cup challenge.
Under these conditions, “there is a 50/50 chance that a major outage will affect Twitter during the two weeks of the competition,” a former employee of the social network said, speaking on condition of anonymity to The Guardian. A third of the teams that had to ensure that the site could cope with large increases in traffic – such as during a soccer World Cup – have been fired by the new CEO.
Almost 100% of racist tweets stick
The opening ceremony and Qatar’s loss to Ecuador in the first match of the tournament did not slow down Twitter. But it was not the most anticipated match. The entry of heavyweights like Brazil, Germany and even France should be a better test of Twitter’s resilience.
However, the start of this “big football party” has already generated a lot of racist and hateful comments towards players of color, with little or no repercussions for the perpetrators, said the Center to Counter Digital Hate (CCDH). ) in a first analysis, whose results were seen by The Guardian. British celebrities Graham Sterling and Bukayo Saka were among the targets of the onslaught of online hate, the CCHR said.
From a selection of 100 reported tweets in 24 hours that referred to black players as “black” or used emojis with clear racist connotations, 99 remained on the platform, The Guardian reports.
However, the moderation rules provide for the censorship of explicitly racist messages. Except that moderation teams, once again, have been reduced to a trickle since Elon Musk took over. “We are very aware that Twitter is running with a very small staff and that is reflected in the increase in unmoderated hate messages,” said Pica Johansson, an online hate expert at the Alan Turing Institute in London. when interviewed by The Guardian.
It must be recognized that racism towards athletes of color has not been born since Elon Musk took over the web: more than 55% of black footballers were the subject of racist tweets during the 2020 Euro Cup and the 2020 African Cup, As stated by FIFA in a statement published in April 2022 to report hate on social media.
But Elon Musk’s promotion of an “absolutist” vision of free speech seems to have further inflamed the situation. It was taken as “a signal to all the racists in the world that Twitter was ready to welcome them,” lamented Imran Ahmed, director of the CCHR, interviewed by the Washington Post.
Knowing that such a toxic hate environment could scare off advertisers, Elon Musk wanted to put some water in his wine. On Friday, November 19, he assured that hateful tweets would not be highlighted by the algorithms and that “they will have to search specifically to find them.”
A guarantee that did not reassure observers who feared the overflow of hatred during the World Cup. “All of the tweets identified (as racist) by the CCHR used the Twitter usernames of the insulted players in their messages,” The Guardian notes.
In 2010, the Soccer World Cup was one of the first events that demonstrated the usefulness of a service like Twitter for following major sporting events and other events live. On that occasion, the site updated its entire architecture to better support traffic spikes. Will the 2022 edition show Elon Musk that his vision of a reduced Twitter in an increasingly hateful digital world has his limits? Nobody knows.
*Article adapted from its original in French
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