Press Play with Madeleine Brand
Twitter Spaces: Audio platform draws extremists and racists
Twitter Spaces launched last spring and soon attracted anti-vaxxers, white supremacists, and ISIS recruiters. The company did little to curb hate speech and even helped the content go viral in some cases.
By Madeleine Brand • • 9m ListenSocial media platform Clubhouse launched near the start of the pandemic. The invite-only app offered audio chat rooms and quickly gained 10 million users, including Elon Musk, Tiffany Haddish, and Drake. As a result, other apps jumped onto the bandwagon, including Twitter, which launched a similar audio platform called Spaces last spring.
But Twitter Spaces soon devolved into a place where anti-vaxxers, white supremacists, and ISIS recruiters thrived. When the company discovered the problem, it did little to curb the hate speech. In some cases, it helped the content go viral. That’s all according to Washington Post Silicon Valley correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin.
