Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

2023/04/09 by Daniel Hickey, Matheus Schmitz, Daniel M. T. Fessler +6 · 4 voices · 75 citations
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Accounting #Advertising #Audit #Business #Computer science #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Internet privacy #Marketing #Moderation #Psychology #Purchasing #Social Media and Politics #Social psychology

paper · pdf · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22222

published in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 17, 1133-1137

openalex publication_date 2023/06/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

On October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, becoming its new CEO and firing many top executives in the process. Musk listed fewer restrictions on content moderation and removal of spam bots among his goals for the platform. Given findings of prior research on moderation and hate speech in online communities, the promise of less strict content moderation poses the concern that hate will rise on Twitter. We examine the levels of hate speech and prevalence of bots before and after Musk's acquisition of the platform. We find that hate speech rose dramatically upon Musk purchasing Twitter and the prevalence of most types of bots increased, while the prevalence of astroturf bots decreased.

Cited by

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• Spiral of Silence: How Neutral Moderation Polarizes Content Creation
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• Bridging gaps in hate speech detection: meta-collections and benchmarks for low-resource Iberian languages
• Mapping InMeDiT Capital: A Conceptual Framework for Post-Digital Families in a Gaseous Society
• Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
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• Cheating or Fair Competition? A Structuration Analysis of Social Media Responses to Lia Thomas’ NCAA Swimming Championship
• Addressing the regulatory gap: moving towards an EU AI audit ecosystem beyond the AI Act by including civil society
• Towards Efficient and Explainable Hate Speech Detection via Model Distillation

Discussions

• Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots [hn, 25 points, 40 comments]
• Kemi Badenoch says she's a "big fan of Elon Musk" because she says there is more "free speech" on his platform. According to a 2023 study, the overall volume of hate speech doubled sitewide on Twitte [bsky, 10 points, 2 comments]
• My advisor was involved in this particular study showing the increase of hate speech on Twitter after Musk's takeover. arxiv.org/abs/2304.04129 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
• Si, si, pour moi c'est du déni. C'est pas la seule étude, on en trouve plusieurs. ex: arxiv.org/pdf/2304.041... Et il suffit de voir les commentaires sur la modération pour qui les tweets d'ED ne son [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

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• Negative Feedback Fuels Hate Speech: A Deep Learning Analysis of 25 Million News Comments