Elon Musk branded a BBC reporter a liar during an interview discussing over whether Twitter’s level of hate speech was on the rise.
In Tuesday’s car crash BBC interview, US tech journalist James Clayton questioned Musk about an alleged increase of hate speech on Twitter since he had aquired the company.
Musk then asked Clayton give an example of such incident…..
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The Mail Online reports: Speaking during the chat, Mr Clayton asked Mr Musk: ‘We’ve spoken to people very recently who were involved in moderation and they just say there’s not enough people to police this stuff, particularly around hate speech in the company. Is that something that you want to address?’
Mr Musk replied: ‘What hate speech are you talking about? I mean, you use Twitter. Do you see a rise in hate speech? Just a personal anecdote? I don’t.’
And Mr Clayton said: ‘Personally, for you, I would say I get more of that kind of content, yeah, personally. But I’m not going to talk for the rest of Twitter.’
Mr Musk then asked him to ‘describe a hateful thing’, and Mr Clayton said: ‘Well, yeah, you know, content that would solicit a reaction, something that is slightly racist, slightly sexist.’
Mr Musk then asked Mr Clayton whether he thinks that ‘if something is slightly sexist it should be banned.’ Mr Clayton denied this was the case, but Mr Musk pressed him to give specific examples.
Mr Clayton then said: ‘Honestly, I don’t… I don’t actually use that feed anymore because I just don’t particularly like it. And actually a lot of people are quite similar. I only look at my followers.’
The Twitter owner said: ‘I’m asking for one example and you can’t give a single one…. I say sir that you don’t know what you are talking about.
You cannot give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet you claimed that hateful content was high. That is false, you just lied.’
But Mr Clayton said there were ‘many organisations’ that would say hateful posts on Twitter were on the rise, such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, before moving on to discuss Covid misinformation.
MailOnline contacted the BBC to establish whether it will be responding to Mr Musk’s claims that Mr Clayton lied, but a spokesman said: ‘We won’t be commenting on this.’
