The way people interact on X has been changing. Research has shown hate speech increased on the platform immediately after Musk took over, and so too did the prevalence of most types of bots.
A new paper from earlier this year replicated those findings. The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Daniel Hickney from the University of California, Berkeley, and examined 4.7 million English-language posts on the platform from the beginning of 2022 through June 9, 2023. This period includes the ten months before Musk bought X and the eight months afterwards.
It measured overt hate speech, the meaning of which was clear to anyone who saw the posts—it did not measure covert types of hate speech, such as coded language used by some extremist groups to spread hate but plausibly deny doing so.
The study found "a clear increase" in the average number of posts containing hate speech following Musk’s purchase of X.
The volume of posts containing hate speech was "consistently" 50% higher after Musk took over X compared to before, a jump from an estimated average of 2,179 to 3,246 posts containing hate speech per week.
Transphobic slurs saw the highest increase, rising from an average of roughly 115 posts per week to about 418.
The level of user engagement with posts containing hate speech also increased under Musk's watch. The weekly rate at which hate speech content was liked by users grew by 70%.
The researchers say these results suggest either hate speech wasn't taken down, hateful users became more active, the platform’s algorithm unintentionally promoted hate speech to users who like such content, or a mix of all of these factors.
Researchers also reported a “potential increase” in the number of bot accounts, partly associated with a large upswing in posts promoting cryptocurrency.
Dr. Michael J. Jensen, who is an associate professor at the University of Canberra, Australia, also noted that the researchers' access to X data was cut off during the study due to a policy change by the platform, which replaced free access to approved academic researchers with payment options that are more or less unaffordable.
Only time will tell if this trajectory toward more hate will continue on X and elsewhere on the internet, but many industry experts aren't very optimistic about the future.
Bill Ready, the chief executive of the image-sharing platform Pinterest, thinks artificial intelligence is largely to blame. "This question of tuning AI is central to how social media became so toxic," he said. "Think about how your own social media world has evolved over the past decade. When social media started out, it was a chronological view of what your friends posted, right? And, over time, it more and more became a view of what the algorithms thought you should see."
