One billionaire owner, twice the hate: Twitter hate speech surged with Musk, study says

In October, polarizing billionaire and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk purchased the polarizing social media platform Twitter for $44 billion, promising to change how the site operated. In various statements, most of them tweets, Musk made allusions to decreased moderation on the platform, pledging to make the site a bastion of “free speech.” In the months that followed, he implemented several new initiatives at the company and the site, including firing hundreds of employees, reinstating hundreds of previously banned accounts, stripping badges of verification from most users who did not pay $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription, and pledging to address the site’s bot problem. According to data collected by researchers from USC, UCLA, UC Merced and Oregon State University, daily use of hate speech by those who previously posted hateful tweets nearly doubled after Musk finalized the sale. “Our aim was to find words that were relatively high precision, meaning that if people are using these words, it’s unlikely they’re being used in a non-hateful manner.” The volume of hate speech posted by hateful users surged after the sale was finalized, although researchers noted that hate speech on Twitter was on the rise even before Musk bought it. “We had not expected that hate users would actually be using more hate words after Elon Musk joined Twitter.” Fessler noted that expressions of intolerance had been on the rise since the start of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and that Musk “winked at those sentiments often enough that a population of active or potential Twitter users who shared those views recognized the opportunity they were being given.” “From a kind of 30,000-foot level,” Fessler said, “the Twitter effect is really reflective of larger trends in society.” Researchers noted that they could not “prove a causal relationship between Musk’s takeover and hate speech.” The CEO’s changes to moderation are “poorly documented,” they said.