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.

Metadata

publication

Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media 17 …, 2023

year

2023

publication date

2023/6/2

authors

Daniel Hickey, Matheus Schmitz, Daniel Fessler, Paul E Smaldino, Goran Muric, Keith Burghardt

link

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/22222

resource_link

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/22222/22001

journal

Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media

volume

17

pages

1133-1137