NAACP Keeps Up Pressure on Elon Musk-Led Twitter

NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson met with new Twitter owner Elon Musk last Tuesday and apparently came away unimpressed. Johnson issued a statement over the weekend calling on advertisers to pause their spending on Twitter, saying, “It is immoral, dangerous and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories. Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, racial slurs have spiked, and conspiracy theories have spread. When we met with Elon Musk, he made commitments that gave us cautious optimism, but until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space, corporations cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter.” He continued, “Twitter must earn its advertisers by creating a platform that safeguards our democracy and rids itself of any content or account that spews hate and disinformation. Any account promoting hate, election denialism and any other form of misinformation or disinformation cannot be allowed to return to Twitter. As we did in 2020 for Facebook, the NAACP will meet with advertisers privately to discuss their ongoing relationship with Twitter. Unlike Elon Musk's past ventures, this one should not be rocket science." The NAACP was among the nearly 50 organizations that collaborated on an open letter last Wednesday to share their concerns with the social network’s top 20 advertisers in the U.S. The letter came from Stop Toxic Twitter, which has since grown to more than 60 civil rights and civil society groups calling on Twitter advertisers to demand a safer Twitter for their brands and for users. Stop Toxic Twitter said on its homepage, “Musk should prioritize making the platform safer, focus on ushering in an era where the company has stronger policies to protect users against hate, harassment and toxicity. But he is doing the exact opposite. Sweeping layoffs at Twitter make it impossible for Twitter to uphold brand safeguards and content moderation. Companies should immediately stop advertising on Twitter in response. Unless and until Musk can invest in and prioritize teams that can robustly enforce Twitter’s existing community standards, the platform is not safe for users nor advertisers.” Partners in Stop Toxic Twitter are: Access NowAccountable TechAdvocates for YouthAI for the PeopleAnti-Defamation LeagueAsian Americans Advancing Justice CenterAzerbaijan Internet WatchBenton Institute for Broadband & SocietyCenter for American ProgressCenter for Countering Digital HateCenter on Race and Digital JusticeChange the Terms CoalitionCoding RightsColor of ChangeCommon CauseDangerous Speech ProjectDemCast USADigital Africa Research LabDistributed Artificial Intelligence Research InstituteDoctors in PoliticsEquality LabsFair Vote UKFree PressFriends of the EarthGLAADGlobal Indigenous Data AllianceGlobal Project Against Hate and ExtremismJewish Women InternationalJustLeadershipUSALatino Anti-Disinformation LabMajal.orgMaria RessaMediaJusticeMedia Matters for AmericaMuslim AdvocatesNAACPNational Center for Transgender EqualityNational Hispanic Media CoalitionNational LGBTQ Task ForceNumun FundPFLAG NationalProgressNow NMPublic CitizenPublic KnowledgeRanking Digital RightsThe Real Facebook Oversight BoardRight to Be (formerly Hollaback!)Roger McNamee (author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe)The Sparrow ProjectStop Hate for Profit CoalitionSumOfUsSuperbloom DesignThe Tech Oversight ProjectThe TransLatin@ CoalitionUjima (National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community)UltraVioletUnion of Concerned ScientistsUnited Church of Christ Media Justice MinistryUnited We DreamValor US#VOTEPROCHOICEVoto LatinoWhose Knowledge?