By Eli Walsh. Bay City News.
Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced Monday that he will deactivate his office's Twitter account due to the recent increase in hate speech on the platform.
In a statement, Rosen called on other district attorneys across the country to leave Twitter in an effort to oppose racist and homophobic speech.
An investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League found that the use of slurs against black, Jewish, and gay and transgender people skyrocketed on the platform in the first full week after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said. became the owner of Twitter.
In addition, the ADL found a 61.3 percent increase in anti-Semitic tweets referencing "Jews or Judaism" in the two weeks after Musk's takeover of Twitter in late October, compared to the previous two weeks.
Rosen also noted that Musk himself has posted tweets that include the "Pepe the Frog" meme, which is not explicitly anti-Semitic, but is frequently used by online anti-Semites and the alt-right.
"Every American has a moral obligation to fight hate speech. There are many ways to do it, big and small," Rosen said. Here's a way: Get off Twitter. My office, the largest prosecutor's office in Northern California, is exiting Twitter."
Rosen also cited Twitter lifting the ban on some 62,000 accounts that were previously banned for, among other things, misogyny, racism, transphobia and other hate speech.
Musk has argued in favor of this "blanket amnesty" for accounts previously banned in the name of free speech.
"Many of these identifiers were previously banned by Twitter because they spread hate and bigotry," Rosen noted. "Now they're back. That is not freedom of expression. It's a cynical marketing ploy."
Rosen said his office account will be officially deactivated on Tuesday. The office will maintain its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SantaClaraDA.
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