The Los Angeles county district attorney’s office said Thursday it has left Twitter due to barrage of “vicious” homophobic attacks that were not removed by the social media platform even after they were reported.
The account, which went by the handle @LADAOffice, no longer exists on Twitter.
“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.”
It said its Pride parade post was met with “a barrage of vicious and offensive comments that left us deeply troubled.”
The comments ranged from “homophobic and transphobic slurs to sexually explicit and graphic images,” the office said, adding that they remained visible in replies to the account more than 24 hours after they were reported to Twitter.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, for instance, recently identified 1.7 million tweets and retweets since the start of 2022 that mention the LGBTQ+ community via a keyword such as “LGBT,” “gay,” “homosexual” or “trans” alongside slurs including “groomer,” “predator” and “pedophile.” In 2022, in the months before Musk took over, there were an average of 3,011 such tweets per day. That jumped 119% to 6,596 in the four months after his takeover from him last October.
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