During that time, Twitter has suspended individual accounts and Hatewatch has repeatedly watched the personalities who operate them return to the site under new handles. Hatewatch, the publishing arm of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, has been in dialogue with Twitter about far-right accounts for years, often as it relates to reaching out for comment on stories. Ultimately, the company chose not to provide a statement. Twitter responded to that reporting by asking when the analysis would be published. Hatewatch followed up with Twitter a second time, detailing additional reporting suggesting that its moderators “are powerless” and are beholden to decrees handed to them by what a source depicted to be the company’s ideologically driven leadership team. On March 25, Twitter did not produce a statement, but instead contacted SPLC’s President and CEO Margaret Huang to protest the naming of employees in this analysis, citing security concerns. On March 24, Hatewatch agreed to a 30-minute, off-the-record conversation with three employees of the corporation to help them better understand what we decided to publish, at their request. Hatewatch first reached out to Twitter for a comment on March 23 about the findings in our analysis, and the company said it would produce a statement. Many of these disinformation superspreaders have never faced any meaningful consequences for violating Twitter’s terms of service. Dorsey and his staff have in fact enabled some repeat offenders, who post at a high volume on the site and have built up big followings to spread hate and disinformation. Twitter does not enforce these rules with any discernible consistency. The company created rules to prevent their users from spreading hateful content, employing automation or “bots” to boost tweets, and misleading the public about elections. Now, those voices are one of the defining characteristics of the platform. Twitter’s willingness to amplify extreme far-right voices has been a significant part of the company’s history. Tim Pool, a pro-Trump social media personality who has claimed to correspond with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in private, also told us when we reached out to him about the billionaire social media executive that he “seems very adamant that far-right figures be given unrestrained platforms.” The analysis features samples of SPLC’s correspondence with Twitter about extreme far-right figures, as well as an insider’s revelations about the company’s struggles with moderation, and critical assessments of researchers from outside our organization. The following analysis lays out an introduction to observations the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has made about Twitter’s longstanding relationship with the far right.
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