The Washington Post is pushing for racially segregated social media use, suggesting Elon Musk’s takeover of ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) has given rise to a drastic increase in hate speech and racism directed at black Americans from so-called ‘right-wing and extremist accounts.’
An “exodus” of black Twitter users allegedly began after Musk opened up freedom of expression on the platform and removed X’s former content moderation against “misinformation, hate speech, and other harmful content,” the Bezos-owned paper claims, parroting the argument of a BBC reporter who previously made unsubstantiated claims of “hate speech” on Twitter to Musk.
“What Elon’s purchase of Twitter has successfully done is create a hostile environment for [Black] folks who were meeting in good faith, to connect and find community,” told Meredith Clark, professor of associate journalism at Northeastern University, to the newspaper.
The result has been to make – what the WaPo terms – “Black Twitter” a “digital diaspora” that requires another social media platform to launch social movements, such as Black Lives Matter.
Some of the potential new platforms for Black Twitter include recently-launched Threads, left-wing journalist favorite Mastodon, the “safety focused” Spoutable, Fanbase, and Spill, which has gained more than 100,000 users and aims to moderate potentially harmful content to the black community by “people and by algorithms trained to pick up on keywords.”
