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Hate speech on X has seen a significant jump since billionaire Elon Musk took over the popular social media app, experts say.
A spike occurred just before the SpaceX founder’s purchase and continued through May 2023, California researchers announced Wednesday. The jump comes with Musk’s own right-turn in politics as he has become a staunch backer of President Donald Trump.
“The weekly rate of hate speech was about 50 percent higher than in months prior to the purchase, including increased use of specific homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs,” they said in a statement.
Hate speech is defined as offensive discourse that targets a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics like race or gender, and that may threaten social peace. In addition to an increase in hate speech, the average number of “likes” on hate posts increased by 70 percent.
The authors of the study published in the journal PLOS One said this increase in engagement suggests that more people were exposed to hate speech.
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Past research found that hate speech had increased on the platform immediately after Musk’s purchase, but it was unclear if the trends were steady throughout his tenure as CEO, which lasted from October 2022 to June 2023. The researchers found that the spike in hate speech continued through May 2023.
While Musk had pledged to remove bots from the site or “die trying,” the analysis revealed that the number of inauthentic accounts did not decrease during that time. In fact, they may have increased.
Last year, Musk said that there would be a purge of bots and trolls, kicking off accounts that violate the company’s rules against platform manipulation and spam. A Rest of World report found that X had failed to take down accounts linked to influence operations.
“These findings,” U.C. Berkeley’s Daniel Hickey and his co-authors said of their new study, “do not support public claims from X that exposure to hate speech decreased after Musk’s purchase.”
A request for comment from X was not immediately returned.
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While information on specific internal changes at the company is limited and the researchers noted they could not draw firm conclusions about a cause-effect relationship between Musk’s purchase of X and their findings, they called for increased moderation on X.
They said more research is needed to further expose the nature of activity across social media platforms.
The researchers highlighted that previous studies have tied hate speech to offline hate crimes. They also pointed out bots can promote misinformation and cause harm like interfering with elections or hampering public health campaigns.
“The policies to reduce exposure to harmful content appear not to be sufficiently effective,” they said.
