Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was followed by an increase in instances of racial slurs on the platform, despite assurances from the platform that it had reduced hateful activity, according to a digital civil rights group. The number of tweets containing one of several different racial slurs soared in the week after Elon Musk purchased the microblogging platform, according to a report by researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Instances of racial slurs have soared on Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the influential platform, despite assurances from the platform that it had reduced hateful activity, a digital civil rights group reported Thursday.
Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the number of tweets containing one of several different racial slurs soared in the week after Musk bought Twitter.
A racial epithet used to attack Black people was found more than 26,000 times, three times the average for 2022. Use of a slur that targets trans people increased 53 percent, while instances of an offensive term for homosexual men went up 39 percent over the yearly average.
Examples of offensive terms used to target Jews and Hispanics also increased.
All told, the researchers looked at nearly 80,000 English-language tweets and retweets from around the world that contained one of the offensive terms they searched for.
“The figures show that despite claims from Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, that the platform had succeeded in reducing the number of times hate speech was being seen on Twitter’s search and trending page, the actual volume of hateful tweets has spiked,” according to the analysis from the center, a nonprofit with offices in the US and United Kingdom.
