Technology

PHILADELPHIA -- Paris Chandler created a Twitter community for black tech workers that eventually became the foundation of her own company.

Now he fears it will all fall apart if Twitter becomes a haven for racist and toxic chatter under serial provocateur Elon Musk, who has hinted he may relax its content rules.

Because Twitter handles most of its business, Chandler doesn't see a good alternative given the uncertainty.

“Before Elon came on board, I felt like the team was working to make Twitter a safer platform, and now they're gone. I don't know what's going on inside. I gave up," said Chandler, 31, founder of Black Tech Pipeline, a job board and recruiting site. "I'm both sad and horrified for Twitter, both its employees and its users."

These concerns weigh on many who have come to rely on Twitter, a relatively small but powerful platform that has become a digital audience for influencers, politicians, journalists and other thought leaders.

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, took Twitter by storm last week with a $44 billion deal that made his style instantly unpredictable.

A few days later, he tweeted a link to a little-known news story that made a dubious claim that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband had been brutally attacked at his California home. He soon took it down, but it was just the beginning of his tenure for those worried about the spread of misinformation online.

Musk also announced his intention to relax bans on hate speech and potentially allow the return of former President Donald Trump and other banned commentators. After the deal was completed, he softened the idea, promising to create a "content control committee" and prevent those removed from the site from returning until procedures were followed.

However, the use of racial slurs quickly exploded in an apparent test of his tolerance level.

“It's getting ugly, folks. I'm not sure what my plan is. Stay or go?" Jennifer Taub, a law professor and author with nearly a quarter of a million followers, tweeted Sunday that she would be leaving Twitter with a link to her Facebook page.

For now, Taub intends to stay and have the opportunity to "laugh, learn and empathize" with people from all over the world. But it would disappear when he became a "cesspool of racism and anti-Semitism" in a phone interview.

"The numbers are going down and down and down," said Taub, who has lost 5,000 followers since Musk officially took over. "Of course I'm having fun there. There are too many people to block."

The debate is especially intense for people of color, who use Twitter to network and raise their voices when addressing toxicity on the platform.

"As a Twitter user, a power user in many ways, it's been very helpful and I'm very concerned about where people are going to take this conversation," said Tanzina Vega, a Latin American journalist based in New York. : who once received death threats on Twitter, but has also built a vibrant community of friends and resources there.

Chandler, a software engineer, hoped to break out of the isolation he felt on his white lawn four years ago by tweeting a question and taking a selfie. I'll go first." The response was overwhelming. He currently has over 60,000 followers and his company connects black tech workers with businesses large and small.

He also received hate mail and even death threats from people who accused him of racism for targeting black techies. But he also connected with Twitter staff who understood his concerns. Chandler said those employees have either left the company or are no longer active on the platform.

Chandler's company also uses Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, but none can replicate the vibrant community he leads on Twitter, where people connect professional networks with lighthearted banter.

Instagram and TikTok feed more on images than text. Facebook is no longer popular among young users. LinkedIn is more formal. Although some developers try to implement alternative sites quickly, it takes time to create a stable, user-friendly site that can handle millions of accounts.

Internet scholar Joan Donovan, whose new book Meme Wars examines the threat misinformation poses to democracy, says it's unclear whether Twitter is a safe place for civil debate. However, he called the networks built there invaluable to users, their communities and Musk.

"That's why Musk bought Twitter instead of creating his own social network," Donovan said. "If you control territory, you can control politics, and in many ways you can control culture."

In his first hours at the helm, Musk fired several top Twitter executives, including Vijay Gade, a senior adviser who oversaw Twitter's content moderation and global security efforts. And the council was abolished, which, even on paper, was responsible only to itself. Twitter began massive layoffs on Friday.

European regulators immediately warned Musk to monitor illegal speech and disinformation under their own digital data privacy laws. In the US, the rules are more flexible for Twitter and its 238 million daily users. But if Congress doesn't tighten the rules first, advertisers, users and possibly lenders could push back.

"When advertisers go and users go, the marketplace of ideas can become regulated," said Carrie Caglianese, an expert on regulatory policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

That could make Twitter another magnet for extremists and conspiracy theorists, prompting some to turn to their friends to counter stories.

Chandler said all he could do was "walk on eggshells" and wait and see.

“Personally, I'll stay on Twitter until I have a reason to stay. I don't know what the future holds, I'm hoping for a miracle," he said, "until I get nowhere.