Elon Musk is at the top of his claims. Not only does he talk about him, the president of the United States, the press and social networks. So do scientists. According to a recent analysis, the hate speeches rate in X was approximately 50% higher for several months after Musk bought the platform of social networks that in the previous months, and the amount of bots and similar accounts did not decrease. A team led by Daniel Hickey from the University of California, Berkeley, has published his findings in Plos One.
Previous studies have Linked the hate discourse in line with the offense crimes offlineand the bots can promote misinformation and spam that could cause harm, for example, contributing to scams, interfering with real world elections or hindering public health campaigns. Similarly, other scientists have shown that, immediately after Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, and became its executive director on October 27, 2022, hate speech increased on the platform.
However, it has not been clear if these trends were maintained during the rest of Musk’s mandate as CEO. To address this gap, Hickey and its colleagues used methods previously developed to measure hate speech in English And the inauthentic activity in X during that period.
The analysis showed that an increase in hate speech that occurred just before Musk bought X continued until May 2023. The weekly hate speech rate was approximately 50% higher than in the months prior to the purchase, Including greater use of homophobic, transfobic and racist insults specific. The average number of “like” in hate publications increased by 70%, suggesting that more people were exposed to hate speech in X. Meanwhile, the presence of bot accounts and other inauthentic accounts did not decrease and In fact, it may have increased.
These findings do not support the public statements of X that exposure to hate speech decreased after the purchase of Musk. The study indicates that, as information on specific internal changes in X is limited, they cannot draw firm conclusions about a cause-effect relationship between the purchase of X by Musk and its findings. Nevertheless, They express their concern for the safety of online platforms and ask for greater moderation in Xas well as more research to shed light on the activity on social media platforms.
“Policies for Reducing exposure to harmful content seems not to be effective enough”, Concludes the study.