Twitter Really Is Worse Than Ever

“The day that [Musk] officially took over the platform, a lot of right-wing figures had started tweeting anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, specifically the term ‘groomer,’” says Kayla Gogarty, research director at Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group, referring to the conspiracy theory that LGBTQ people prey on younger people by “grooming” them. “[These accounts] were basically saying that they were testing the waters” of Twitter’s content moderation, she says.

Twitter’s policies do not allow slurs and tropes that “intend to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.”

“There seems to have been a clear indication that people anticipated that Musk would reduce moderation,” says Keith Burghardt, a computer scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and one of the co-authors of the paper. “But it’s clear that hate speech didn’t decline immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter, suggesting that whatever moderation he did was not enough.”

Even before it reduced the size of its moderation teams, Twitter wasn’t particularly quick to remove hateful content, according to Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, a nonprofit that tracks anti-Semitism online in both English and Arabic. 

Data collected by CyberWell found that though only 2 percent of anti-Semitism content on social media platforms in 2022 was violent, 90 percent of that came from Twitter. And Cohen Montemayor notes that even the company’s standard moderation systems would likely have struggled under the strain of so much hateful content. “If you’re experiencing surges [of online hate speech] and you have changed nothing in the infrastructure of content moderation, that means you’re leaving more hate speech on the platform,” she says.

Civil society organizations that used to have a direct line to Twitter’s moderation and policy teams have struggled to raise their concerns, says Isedua Oribhabor, business and human rights lead at Access Now. “We’ve seen failure in those respects of the platform to actually moderate properly and to provide the services in the way that it used to for its users,” she says.

Daniel Hickey, a visiting scholar at the USC’s Information Sciences Institute and coauthor of the paper, says that Twitter’s lack of transparency makes it hard to assess whether there was simply more hate speech on the platform, or whether the company made substantive changes to its policies after Musk’s takeover. “It is quite difficult to disentangle often because Twitter is not going to be fully transparent about these types of things,” he says.

That lack of transparency is likely to get worse. Twitter announced in February that it would no longer allow free access to its AP—the tool that allows academics and researchers to download and interact with the platform’s data.  “For researchers who want to get a more extended view of how hate speech is changing, as Elon Musk is leading the company for longer and longer, that is certainly much more difficult now,” says Hickey. 

In the months since Musk took over Twitter, major public news outlets like National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Company, and other public media outlets have left the platform after being labeled as “state-sponsored,” a designation that was formerly only used for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media. Yesterday, Musk reportedly threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter handle.