In the past few months you may have noticed a number of Trending Hashtags that lived for hours maybe days promoting racist hate. In many instances the trends were started by average users under 100k followers but in some of the cases the trends were started by Stars or fake star accounts that twitter has allowed for years.
The worst instance of racism in Trends that was not addressed was last week when just after the Japan earthquake thousands of haters began tweeting to the HashTag #Katrina saying that America should not help Japan because no one especially the Japanese provided help to New Orleans…
Japan did donate to Katrina.
This was outrageous because everyone knows that almost 6 billion dollars in donations and government aid was spent on Katrina within the first 3 months. Hollywood put on telethons and we all saw what Kanye West had to say about the President. Unfortunately the hate did not stop with the President and it seemed all of white america was to blame for a hurricane and disaster beyond anyone’s control.
Well the Katrina Hashtag was not the first and not the end and if you are on twitter you have seen the trend “white people stink” for the last week and now another Sunday Night about Huckleberry Finn after a 60 Minutes television broadcast looked into the removal of the “N” word from the book.
In addition to Trends that are allowed to go on for hours, days, weeks filled with racist hate if you are an unfortunate that happens to mention the hashtag and say these things are wrong this should not be on Twitter… you are likely to have dozens of hate bots monitor your account then submit you as spam.
This seems exactly contrary to how Twitter is suppose to react.
If there is actual hate out there they should remove it for concern of all their users not kowtow to anyone especially significant stars with millions of followers like 50 cent or Gilbert Goddfried who both attacked Japanese people at the worst possible time.
For goodness sakes they are attacking people during a earthquake that caused a tsunami and then 4 nuclear power plants to melt down and 2 more on the way…
Anyway it seems pretty evident and after contacting a number of Twitter Developers that work for them this weekend that there is something going on… The inhouse staff that I talked with didn’t want to respond directly to me when I asked them… probably in fear of repercussions… I can understand that to a point…
However it is very plain to see when the whole world starts tweeting that racists have taken over Twitter there is a problem.
I sat there and watched that Katrina Trend for about 3 hours and in English, Spanish, Japanese and people who asked in english but were from europe and around the world … everyone was wondering why?
Well just like there are Bieber bots and insurance company bots and viagra bots… there seems to be racist bots. At least hopefully it is partly bots because if it is all humans pushing these trends then there is something very serious wrong out there.
Why would Twitter allow this?
Well although they don’t have conventional advertising they are still making money .. you better believe that… and if they allow these trends to push page views they make money.
This is not reasonable.
The haters like 50 cent, Gilbert Goddfried and the rest need to be held accountable and when people speak up about the hate they should not have their accounts banned.
I have personally had two accounts banned and the total number of comments that could have been associated to these hashtags is well under 100 over many days and weeks.
I also know this is happening to other honest people who are reporting racist hate.
BUT PLEASE do not take my word for this …
I just ask you open your eyes and take notice when these Trends Of Hate start popping up.
