Hate Speech Soars On Twitter After Musk’s Takeover

The New York Times reports:

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

These changes are alarming, researchers said, adding that they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.

Read the full article.

Breaking News: Hate speech on Twitter has jumped since Elon Musk took over, researchers found.

Musk “sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” the head of one of the research groups said.https://t.co/G7G2oZ89BB

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 2, 2022