The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has exited Twitter over a “barrage of vicious” and homophobic attacks triggered by a tweet celebrating the local Pride parade.
“Our decision to archive our Twitter account was not an easy one,” the office said in a statement. “It came after a series of distressing comments over time, culminating in a shocking response to photographs we posted celebrating LADA’s first known entry into a Pride parade.”
The online abuse ranged from “homophobic and transphobic slurs to sexually explicit and graphic images.” The District Attorney’s Office added that the tweets left them “deeply troubled,” especially because they remained visible on the social media platform 24 hours after they were reported.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter late last year, attacks on LGBTQ+ users have skyrocketed, according to The Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The advocacy group recently identified 1.7 million tweets and retweets since the start of 2022 referring to the LGBTQ+ community with keywords including “LGBT,” “gay,” “homosexual” or “trans” alongside slurs including “groomer,” “predator” and “pedophile.”
In 2022, in the months before the Tesla tycoon took over, there were an average of 3,011 such tweets per day. That figure spiked to 6,596 — an increase of 119% — in the four months after Musk formally acquired Twitter in October.
In taking over the company, Musk — a self-described “free-speech absolutist” — vowed to loosen Twitter rules he believed were too limiting. In April, the social media platform erased a policy prohibiting the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
The vitriolic content is also in part due to cuts in staffing. Musk implemented sweeping layoffs in his early days as CEO, which left too few content moderators to scrub problematic tweets. Last week, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, also resigned.