Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — Spotify Technology SA, the music streaming giant, is ending production of several live audio shows, pulling back from a once-promising programming area.

Deux Me After Dark, Doughboys: Snack Pack, The Movie Buff  from comedian Jon Gabrus, and A Gay in the Life have all ended their runs or announced they will do so, according to a Spotify spokesperson. The Fantasy Footballers and The Ringer MMA Show will continue.

Streaming companies and social-media outlets once viewed live audio streaming as a potential growth area. In 2020, during the pandemic, live audio apps were especially popular. Most notably, Clubhouse soared to a $4 billion valuation, while established companies rushed to copy the app. Facebook launched Live Audio Rooms, LinkedIn introduced Audio Events and Twitter debuted Spaces.

But some are now retreating. Besides Spotify, Facebook has shut down its live product.

In some cases, Spotify canceled programs before the creators’ contracts were completed, though the company is paying out the entirety of their agreements, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. These programs, which were essentially live podcasts, often aired weekly and allowed hosts to moderate conversations while interacting with audience members. On-demand versions are available on Spotify for replay, as well.

As part of its push into live shows, Spotify in March 2021  acquired Betty Labs, the maker of Locker Room, a sports-centric audio app, and relaunched it as Greenroom. Earlier this year, Spotify rebranded the format and app as Spotify Live and integrated the shows into its main streaming app. A company announcement highlighted programming like Deux Moi’s show and Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper’s After Hours. Though Spotify advertised Cooper’s show as weekly, only two episodes aired.

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(Bloomberg) — Paytm will buy back as much as 8.5 billion rupees ($103 million) of its own shares, following a roughly 75% plunge in the Indian fintech company’s stock price since going public in 2021.

The board at Paytm, whose official name is One 97 Communications Ltd., on Tuesday approved a plan to repurchase as many as 10.5 million shares at 810 rupees apiece on the open market, the company said in a statement Tuesday. That is a 59% premium to Thursday’s closing price, before the company said it was considering a buyback.

“Paytm board believes that this buyback is a sign of confidence that the company is on a clear path to deliver cash flow profitability, and this buyback will not have any impact on its growth plans in the near future or on its profitability plans,” Paytm, once India’s most valuable startup, said in a filing. 

Paytm said it is ahead of its plans to achieve an operating profit before employee stock options costs by the end of September 2023.

While a buyback may help bolster Paytm shares, which floated at 2,150 rupees at their initial public offering, some investors worry about management using cash to prop up the stock price rather than to turn around loss-making operations.

Headquartered on the outskirts of New Delhi, the company posted a wider second-quarter loss last month. It competes with Walmart Inc.’s PhonePe and Alphabet Inc.’s GPay in the crowded Indian fintech market.

Companies cannot use money raised from an IPO to fund a share buyback, Paytm said previously. Any buyback would use cash on the company’s books, it said ahead of the announcement.

Backed by China’s Ant Group Co. and Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., Paytm had a cash balance of 91.8 billion rupees at the end of September, according to its earnings statement last month.

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(Bloomberg) — FTX Co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces extradition to the US to face criminal fraud charges, made his first appearance in Bahamas court since his arrest on Monday. 

Bankman-Fried was dressed in a blue suit and white shirt for the arraignment proceedings. Shortly after they began the judge called a recess to discuss the case with his lawyers. 

The hearing in Nassau is the first step in a legal process that may result in Bankman-Fried being extradited to the US.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan revealed that they had charged him with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud, for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customers’ funds before last month’s spectacular collapse of his cryptocurrency empire.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options,” Mark Cohen, his attorney said in a statement on Tuesday.

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(Bloomberg) — Airbnb Inc. released the findings of its anti-discrimination efforts over the past several years, revealing a discrepancy in how guests who are perceived to be Black are approved for short-term bookings on its platform compared with their White counterparts.

The research includes data from the company’s Project Lighthouse, an initiative undertaken in 2020 in partnership with Color of Change, the online racial justice organization. Airbnb found that guests perceived to be Black had a 91.4% acceptance rate for bookings made in 2021 while those perceived to be White had a 94.1% acceptance rate. Guests perceived to be Asian and Latino or Hispanic had success rates of 93.4%. The rates are based on a random sample of 750,000 reservation requests. The study determined the perceived race of guests by using a first name and profile photo. 

San Francisco-based Airbnb has been working to address bias in bookings for years, making changes in 2018 to allow hosts to see a guest’s profile photo only after accepting a booking. Since then, Airbnb has rolled out new features to combat bias and make the platform more welcoming as it expects new hosts to come online as the economy softens. 

“This is definitely a continuation of the journey we’ve been on in the past six years,” said Janaye Ingram, Airbnb’s director of community partner programs and engagement. “We have a saying — ‘you can’t fix what you can’t measure.’”

In 2016 Airbnb undertook a civil rights audit of the platform, led by Laura Murphy, former American Civil Liberties Union attorney. The resulting 32-page report detailed changes the company asked members to abide by to root out racial discrimination, including an “Open Doors” policy that obligated Airbnb to accommodate any guest who reports discrimination and expanding an option called “Instant Book,” which makes a host’s home available immediately upon booking, without the host having to approve the guest ahead of time. The company followed up with a review in 2019 and launched Project Lighthouse a year later.The majority of reservations analyzed by Project Lighthouse were instant bookings, which Airbnb says “facilitates more objective bookings.” Hosts can make Instant Book accessible to guests who meet requirements like having at least one review and past positive reviews. However, the report found that guests perceived to be Black or Latino had lower usage of instant booking, largely because many don’t have a review history or are first-time users. 

Removing profile photos early in the booking “proved not to make as big as a dent” as expected, Murphy said. 

Airbnb is exploring changes it can make to host and guest profiles to highlight information that could foster a better connection” between the two and close the gap in reservation success among perceived races.

To help make the booking process more equitable, Airbnb is seeking to make more people eligible for instant bookings, including by allowing people with verified identities and a good track record to qualify, even if they don’t have any previous reviews. The company estimates that the changes will make 5 million people qualified for the service. Starting next year, co-travelers will inherit the reviews of the guest who made the reservation, which will help build up their track record. 

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(Bloomberg) — Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced co-founder of digital-asset exchange FTX, was accused by US authorities on Tuesday of perpetrating a massive fraud that funded his lavish lifestyle. 

US prosecutors in Manhattan revealed eight criminal counts against him and federal regulators said he committed a range of securities and derivatives law violations. Bankman-Fried, who had been living in an expansive penthouse in the Bahamas, was arrested there on Monday evening.

The US indictment detailing the charges follows weeks of speculation over the the 30-year-old’s fate after his company — once one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world — plunged into bankruptcy last month. 

He’ll be arraigned in the Bahamas on Tuesday and faces extradition to the US. “Mr. Bankman-Fried is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options,” Mark Cohen, his attorney said in a statement. 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday alleged that FTX raised more than $1.8 billion, including $1.1 billion from about 90 US-based investors, in an “orchestrated scheme to defraud equity investors,” who bought in based on the belief that FTX had appropriate controls. 

Separately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleged that Bankman-Fried took hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Alameda Research, which he also founded, which were then used to buy real estate and make donations to politicians. 

• Read more: The Charges Against Bankman-Fried Filed by SEC, DOJ, CFTC

According to the SEC, Bankman-Fried misled investors, telling them that FTX had sophisticated risk controls and that their assets were secure. Instead, the regulator alleged in its complaint, he was using their money as a “virtually unlimited line of credit” for trading firm Alameda while concealed risks and obscuring FTX’s relationship with the trading firm.

More than 100 FTX-related entities, including Alameda, filed for US bankruptcy protections on Nov. 11. 

• Follow Live: FTX CEO John J Ray III Says Securing Assets to Take Weeks or Months: TOPLive

Media Interviews

In media interviews since FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried has admitted major managerial missteps, but has also claimed that he never tried to commit fraud or break the law.

In draft remarks prepared for the US House hearing and obtained by Bloomberg News prior to his arrest, he offered a blunt assessment of his plight. 

“I would like to start by formally stating under oath: I f—-ked up,” Bankman-Fried wrote in the draft.

He added that the company’s new managers, led by restructuring expert John J. Ray III, have repeatedly rebuffed his offers to help sift through the wreckage of the collapsed crypto empire. Ray hasn’t responded to five of his emails, he said. Ray is still scheduled to testify at the hearing on Tuesday. 

In remarks prepared for the House hearing, Ray blamed FTX’s collapse on the failures of its previous leaders.

“The FTX Group’s collapse appears to stem from the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals,” Ray said in the written testimony released Monday in advance of the hearing. The prior management “failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls that are necessary for a company that is entrusted with other people’s money or assets.”

Crypto Exchanges

Prior to the arrest and long before his empire collapsed into bankruptcy, federal prosecutors in Manhattan had already been looking into FTX as part of broader sweep of exchanges and potential anti-money laundering violations under the Bank Secrecy Act.

The investigation, led by the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit, took a different trajectory after FTX’s catastrophic implosion.

Prosecutors were closely examining whether hundreds of millions of dollars were improperly transferred to the Bahamas around the time of FTX’s Nov. 11 bankruptcy filing in Delaware, according to a person familiar with the matter.

They were also digging into whether FTX broke the law by transferring funds to Alameda Research, the bankrupt investment firm also founded by Bankman-Fried, Bloomberg reported previously.

Last week, prosecutors, the FBI, Department of Justice officials and FTX’s new CEO and restructuring expert Ray met at SDNY’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Potential charges were not discussed at that meeting, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

–With assistance from Joanna Ossinger, Beth Williams and Gillian Tan.

(Updates with criminal charges throughout.)

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(Bloomberg) — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud, for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customers’ funds before the spectacular collapse of his cryptocurrency empire.

An indictment detailing the charges was unsealed by a federal court judge in Manhattan Tuesday morning following weeks of speculation the 30-year-old would end up in handcuffs after his company — one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world — ended up in bankruptcy last month.

Read more: Read the Charges Against Bankman-Fried Filed by SEC, DOJ, CFTC

The indictment alleges that Bankman-Fried agreed with others “to defraud customers of FTX.com by misappropriating those customers’ deposits and using those deposits to pay expenses and debts of Alameda Research.”

The stunning development came on the back of police in the Bahamas arresting Bankman-Fried on Monday evening, hours before he was due to testify before US Congress about FTX’s downfall. In separate court filings earlier Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Bankman-Fried for his role in the collapse of FTX.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options,” Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Mark S. Cohen, said in a statement.

 

Bankman-Fried spent the night in a local police station in Nassau and is due to face arraignment in magistrate court later Tuesday. He has admitted to grievous managerial missteps but vehemently denied knowingly committing fraud or breaking the law.

Prosecutors claim Bankman-Fried and other executives used FTX customer deposits to pay off his crypto fund, Alameda Research, beginning in 2019. They claim he provided false information to lenders about Alameda’s financial condition and misled customers about FTX’s finances, conspired to launder the proceeds of the fraud and used some of the money in violation of US campaign finance laws.

The indictment accuses Bankman-Fried of working with others to make corporate contributions to political candidates and committees that exceeded the $25,000 annual limit, and making donations in the name of other people to avoid that limit.

The case was assigned to US District Judge Ronnie Abrams.

Manhattan prosecutors began investigating the collapse of FTX last month amid allegations billions of dollars had been commingled between the platform and sister trading house Alameda Research. 

The probe has been spearheaded by the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit at the Southern District of New York US Attorney’s Office. The speed at which an arrest has been made is uncommon in complex financial crime cases, especially with a dearth of company records.

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said on Twitter Monday that complicated fraud cases often take years to prosecute but SBF’s is an exception because his actions are difficult to justify.

His customers were told their money would remain at FTX but a lot of it went to a different company, and some to him, via a loan, Mariotti wrote.

Lawyers and FTX’s newly appointed chief executive officer, restructuring expert John Jay Ray III, have spent weeks poring over the group’s patchy financial documents and attempting to secure assets to repay creditors. 

Last week the bankruptcy team and Ray met with prosecutors at SDNY’s offices in downtown Manhattan.

Bankman-Fried has participated in dozens of media interviews since the downfall of FTX, despite allegations he oversaw the misappropriation of customer funds on an enormous scale.

Now that he is in custody, he will have a choice between fighting extradition to the US to formally face the charges or waiving his right to a hearing.

The case is: US v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cr-673, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan)

(updates with statement from SBF lawyer.)

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(Bloomberg) — US stocks advanced and yields on Treasuries tumbled across the curve after data showed prices rose less than forecast last month, cementing optimism the Federal Reserve will slow the pace of rate increases.

The S&P 500 jumped as much as 2.8% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose as much as 3.9% before paring gains. The policy-sensitive two-year Treasury yield sank more than 15 basis points after a key gauge of US consumer prices posted the smallest monthly advanced in more than a year. The greenback halted a two-day rally.

Tuesday’s data, taken with the slower-than-projected CPI print in the prior month, validates the Fed’s projected half-point move on Wednesday and sets the tone for future rate decisions. The swap markets also trimmed their rate-hike wagers, with the odds now favoring a quarter-point hike as early as the Fed’s February meeting. 

Read More: US Core CPI Posts Smallest Monthly Increase in More Than a Year

“For the second consecutive month, inflation came in below expectations. This is good news for markets and the Federal Reserve,” said Phillip Neuhart, director of market and economic research for First Citizens Bank Wealth Management. “Should this downtrend persist, it allows the Fed to slow the pace of interest rate hikes and eventually pause in the first half of next year.”

Still, some investors are approaching the CPI surprise cautiously.

“While the war against inflation is turning, we are a long way off declaring victory and the Fed will keep its hawkish stance for a while longer, even if it does potentially force a recession,” said Richard Carter, head of fixed interest research at Quilter Cheviot.

The CPI-fueled stock rally fails to recognize that corporate earnings are just starting to see the impact of tight monetary policy, James Athey, investment director at Abrdn.

“As the full effects of the Fed’s aggressive actions this year play out next year, it seems inevitable that we will see a significant repricing lower in EPS forecasts and thus the broad market,” Athey said.

Following the Fed, the European Central Bank will announce its rate decision Thursday. Markets will also contend with decisions from the Bank of England and monetary authorities in Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Switzerland and Taiwan.

Key events this week:

• FOMC rate decision and Fed Chair news conference, Wednesday
• China medium-term lending, property investment, retail sales, industrial production, surveyed jobless, Thursday
• ECB rate decision and ECB President Lagarde briefing, Thursday
• Rate decisions for UK BOE, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thursday
• US cross-border investment, business inventories, empire manufacturing, retail sales, initial jobless claims, industrial production, Thursday
• Eurozone S&P Global PMI, CPI, Friday

Some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

• The S&P 500 rose 1.6% as of 10:27 a.m. New York time
• The Nasdaq 100 rose 2.5%
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.8%
• The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 2.1%
• The MSCI World index rose 0.5%

Currencies

• The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 1%
• The euro rose 0.9% to $1.0631
• The British pound rose 1% to $1.2392
• The Japanese yen rose 1.8% to 135.22 per dollar

Cryptocurrencies

• Bitcoin rose 3.5% to $17,780
• Ether rose 4.2% to $1,328.93

Bonds

• The yield on 10-year Treasuries declined 16 basis points to 3.45%
• Germany’s 10-year yield declined four basis points to 1.90%
• Britain’s 10-year yield advanced five basis points to 3.25%

Commodities

• West Texas Intermediate crude rose 2.2% to $74.79 a barrel
• Gold futures rose 2.1% to $1,830.80 an ounce

This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.

–With assistance from Natalia Kniazhevich, Reade Pickert, Michael Msika and Sagarika Jaisinghani.

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(Bloomberg) — Bitcoin jumped the most since just after the exchange FTX sought protection from creditors a month ago, as a rally in US equities provided a respite for the battered digital-asset world. 

The largest cryptocurrency by market value rose as much 4.6% to $17,961 on Tuesday, the biggest intraday increase since Nov. 14. Bitcoin is down about 16% since FTX ran into trouble in early November. Ether, Binance Coin, Solana and Avalanche also posted gains. 

Bitcoin, which was originally championed as being unconnected with the traditional world of finance, has been trading mostly in lock-step for the past year with risk assets such as equities. US stocks soared on Tuesday after data showed prices rose less than forecast last month, cementing optimism the Federal Reserve will slow the pace of rate increases.

“It seems as if the most negative fallout of FTX/Alameda has already played out,” said Riyad Carey, a research analyst at crypto data firm Kaiko. That is “allowing tokens to react positively to good macro news.”

Cryptocurrencies have tumbled this as the Fed raises interest rates from the stimulus levels put in place during the Covid pandemic, which is prompting investors to pull back on risk exposure. 

The pullback has helped to magnify the risk in the digital-asset market, such as the operations of FTX. Bitcoin has stumbled about 60% this year. 

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged Tuesday with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customers’ funds before the spectacular collapse of his cryptocurrency empire.

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(Bloomberg) — Binance Holdings Ltd., the dominant cryptocurrency exchange, has been hit by large outflows as traders move to take custody of their tokens amid revelations that rival FTX may have misused customer funds before its November implosion. 

Net outflows of digital tokens from Binance amounted to about $3.7 billion in the past week, including almost $2 billion in the last 24 hours, according to data from research firm Nansen as of 9:20 a.m. in London. The one-day number was nearly 18 times higher than the next largest outflow, which was from Bitfinex.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has taken to Twitter in past days to express confidence in the firm’s outlook. In a tweet on Tuesday, he said Binance has had about $1.14 billion of net withdrawals “today.” It wasn’t clear if he was referring to a 24-hour period. 

Exchange outflows are being scrutinized against a backdrop of concern that more dominoes may fall in the crypto sector following the bankruptcy of FTX and the arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, on Monday. The fallen mogul’s empire blew up amid allegations that customer funds were mishandled, leaving potentially over a million creditors and eroding trust in the industry.

Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested in Bahamas After US Files Charges

“The flows are still relatively small considering Binance’s reserves,” said Alex Svanevik, chief executive officer at Nansen, referring to Binance’s recent outflows. “But given everything that’s happened, it’s not surprising many are choosing a cautious approach.”

 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday said it charged Bankman-Fried with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors in FTX.” He was also charged with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud, in an indictment unsealed by a federal court judge in Manhattan. 

Binance’s native token Binance Coin fell as much as 7.1% on Tuesday before erasing losses and trading 1.2% higher at 3 p.m in London. Bitcoin and Ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, also advanced after after new data showed a slowdown in a key measure of US inflation. 

Market maker Jump Trading is among those pulling funds from Binance’s platform, according to Nansen. Jump took out a net $18.4 million in the last 24 hours and $123.4 million in the last seven days on the Ethereum blockchain, the data shows.

While a market maker like Jump routinely moves large sums in and out of exchanges, “it’s unusual to see such steady outflows without any inflows at all,” Svanevik said.

Binance temporarily halted withdrawals of stablecoin USDC on Tuesday because it couldn’t process those transactions until its banks in the US opened, Zhao said in a tweet. “We expect the situation will be restored when the banks open,” he tweeted. 

Because Binance automatically converts deposits of USDC into its own-branded stablecoin BUSD, it must change client holdings back into USDC when they want to withdraw the latter from its exchange.

Binance and Zhao have been at pains to counter any attempts to shroud the firm in so-called FUD — crypto parlance for fear, uncertainty and doubt. One part of that is an effort to reassure about its reserves. Binance in a November blog post shared details of digital-asset wallet addresses with tokens worth about $69 billion. 

Last week, the exchange released a proof of reserves report. The document, based on a snapshot review by accounting firm Mazars, shows the exchange having sufficient crypto assets to balance its total platform liabilities. 

But the report also acknowledges limitations, as it didn’t amount to a true financial statement audit that would have given a clearer picture of Binance’s overall health.

$2 Trillion Rout

The crypto industry remains mired in a deep downturn after a $2 trillion rout in digital assets over the past year. The slide has been pockmarked with a series of blowups of which FTX, once valued at $32 billion, was perhaps the most damaging. 

FTX’s wipeout is an event Zhao may have himself helped accelerate with a Nov. 6 tweet about plans to sell a $530 million holding of FTX’s native digital token. 

Zhao — also known as CZ — has been trying to restore confidence in the industry. Last month he vowed to set up a recovery fund of up to $2 billion to help promising crypto startups facing a liquidity squeeze. He’s also said that Binance US is planning to revive its bid for the assets of bankrupt lender Voyager Digital.

Binance has cemented its position as the biggest crypto exchange in the wreckage of FTX’s Nov. 11 bankruptcy. Its daily average trading volume in the first week of December was over eight times greater that of runner-up Coinbase Global Inc.. The comparable figure in the last week of October was about seven times. That’s based on calculations on data from digital-asset information provider Kaiko.

However, publicly traded Coinbase has been less impacted by customers withdrawing crypto, recording a $546 million net outflow in the past week and a small inflow over the last 24 hours, Nansen data show. 

For crypto market prices: CRYP; for top crypto news: TOP CRYPTO.

–With assistance from Isis Almeida.

(Updates with Zhao’s estimate of withdrawals in third paragraph.)

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(Bloomberg) — Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric increased on Twitter Inc. after Elon Musk bought the platform in October, according to a new report by the gay rights organization GLAAD and the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. 

Users retweeted anti-LGBTQ speech much more frequently over the past month since Musk bought the platform, the GLAAD and Media Matters analysis shows. The report compared data from the month before Musk’s acquisition with the month after he bought it. 

Twitter specifically saw an uptick in the use of the word “groomer,” a pejorative term that equates LGBTQ equality with pedophilia, according to the report. 

The groups singled out nine high-profile accounts that they have identified as leading perpetrators of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on Twitter. That includes YouTube commentator Tim Pool, alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, conservative pundit Mike Cernovich and others. 

Retweets of those accounts’ tweets mentioning the word “groomer” jumped more than 1,200%, going from nearly 3,600 retweets in the months before Musk’s takeover to more than 48,000 in the month following. Those same accounts saw a 1,100% increase in mentions that use the slur, going from more than 5,300 to more than 65,000, according to the report. “Ok Groomer” trended on Twitter earlier in November. 

The data contradicts claims by Musk that hate speech impressions have declined on Twitter since he became chief executive officer. And it provides some analysis to bolster anecdotal claims that hateful speech and harassment have escalated since Musk declared he would relax speech rules on the platform and restored accounts that had been suspended for amplifying hate speech. 

Twitter and Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment. Musk, who has called himself a free speech absolutist, on Sunday criticized those who state their pronouns, as many LGBTQ people and their allies do.

Kayla Gogarty, the deputy research director for Media Matters and author of the study, said the report focuses on the word “groomer” because it’s become an increasingly popular rallying cry for conservatives opposed to LGBTQ rights. She added that the issue goes far beyond the nine accounts singled out in the report. 

“Those are key accounts we zeroed in on to highlight how widespread the issue is,” Gogarty said. “But it goes beyond just these nine key accounts. As soon as Musk took over, we did see a bunch of right-wing figures see how far they could go in some of the language,” she added.  

The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday will hold a hearing focused on anti-LGBTQ hate, partly in response to the shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs last month that left five people dead and more than a dozen injured. 

The groups plan to share the report’s findings with the committee ahead of the hearing. “I hope in general the committee really considers the impact of a lot of this online hate speech on some of the real-world violence we’re seeing,” said Gogarty.

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