At the end of October, Twitter was acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk for $4,400 million. After that, he laid off almost half of the company’s 8,000 employees. In such a situation, the use of offensive language on the platform has started to increase at a massive rate. As a case study for the report, the researchers looked at various ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ tweets about the November 19 Colorado Springs shooting. In that incident, five people were killed in an ‘LGBTQ’ club.
Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit organization based in the United States, says that the average engagement of insulting tweets on Twitter has increased by a quarter of a hundred percent! In the two weeks prior to Musk’s acquisition, tweets using ‘nigger’, ‘truancy’ or ‘fagot’ averaged 13.3 replies, retweets and likes, the report said. However, after the acquisition this number increased to 49 and a half.
According to CCDH’s investigative report, daily use of the word ‘nigga’ on Twitter tripled on average before and after the acquisition by Musk; Daily use of the word ‘cunt’ increased by 33 percent; The use of the word ‘fagot’ increased by 58 per cent and the use of the word ‘truancy’ increased by 62 per cent.
Although Elon Musk said a few days ago, hate speech on Twitter has decreased by a third. A few days after this claim, the British media outlet Sky News published this investigative report on Friday. In the three months prior to Mask’s acquisition, the top 10 accounts using such language gained an average of 222,700 followers per month, the report said. And in the month of acquisition, that number increased to 944,250 followers, which is 320 percent more than before.
Musk’s ‘amnesty’ announcement will allow accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s policies to return to the platform. These include the accounts of various white supremacists, misogynists and far-right conspiracy theorists. However, Musk claimed in a tweet after the publication of the report that ‘even if such users grow at a massive rate, the impression of hate speech on the platform, the number of views of such tweets will continue to decrease’. He said, ‘About 500 million tweets and billions of attitudes are published every day. As a result, overall hate speech sentiment on Twitter is less than zero-tenths of a percent.”