Here’s a hateful message to spread under any circumstances: “My fellow Jews, the time to start killing Arabs is NOW.” And here’s a message that Twitter took money to promote: “My fellow Jews, the time to start killing Arabs is NOW.”
Today, Twitter blocked white supremacist tweets promoted by notorious troll and human-sized used condom full of diarrhoea Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer. That’s good. But without a proactive vetting system in place, promoted posts remain a great way for arseholes to spew bigotry to a wide audience — they can even target groups they assume will be most offended, and reach people who have blocked their accounts.
Despite an official ban on hate language in promoted tweets, shit diamonds like this are slipping through:
I feel like… Maybe twitter should not allow tweets like this to be promoted? @Support pic.twitter.com/vo17NRGRzy
— Erin Gloria Ryan (@morninggloria) May 7, 2015
Josh Bornstein, the man whose account tweeted those terrible words, had his Twitter hacked by a white supremacist group, who decided to troll him by publishing racist tweets from his account. Just yesterday, this group was able to broadcast this trash under Bornstein’s name.
Unless the company adopts a better system to weed out hate speech in its promoted content, this kind of crap is going to keep happening. I’ve asked Twitter if it plans to introduce new measures to prevent hate speech in promoted and tweets and will update if I hear back.