Claim: Hate speech has risen on Twitter since Elon Musk became the owner

Question

There have been claims that hate speech has risen on Twitter ever since Elon Musk took over the company as seen here and here. Has there been a rise, and if so, how is it calculated?

Answer 1

There has been a rise in hate speech against Black Americans. gay men, and even Jewish people. According to the New York Times, after Elon bought Twitter slurs against Black Americans increased in appearance from 1,282 to 3,876 times a day. Similarly, slurs against gay men rose from 2,506 to 3,964 and antisemitic slurs rose more than 61% after two weeks.

 One theory for this is that the accounts that twitter used to regulate or were previously banned were allowed back onto the site when Elon purchased Twitter for $44 billion. For example, Donald Trump's Twitter account was reactivated after the repurchase of Twitter for which it had previously been banned for tweets inciting violence.  Accounts on Twitter that are associated with QAnon conspiracists and ISIS terrorist groups were allowed back onto the site as well. The Twitter Anti-Defamation League which reports antisemitic tweets and tracks posts have gone down in taking action against harmful posts by 50%.

Elon has not provided the details of how he is measuring hate speech on twitter, only that "hate speech impressions" have decreased by 1/3 since his purchase of the site.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html

Answer 2

Focusing on antisemitism specifically:

According to a CNN article, Jared Moskowitz, a Jewish lawmaker, claimed that after speaking about antisemitism on Twitter, he was bombarded with antisemitic messages. "He also cited statistics from the Anti-Defamation League, stating there has been a more than 60% increase in antisemitic comments on Twitter since Musk took over the platform."

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/congressman-antisemitism-twitter/index.html

On the ADL's website, they wrote an article in early December 2022 that stated they "noted both an increase in antisemitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of antisemitic posts..." They claim that their Center on Extremism sampled 529k tweets mentioning "Jews " or "Judaism" from both before and after the takeover. They noted an "increase in the percentage of tweets that espoused or defended antisemitic sentiments." They also provide numbers showing how Twitter has responded to reports of antisemitic tweets before and after Elon Musk's takeover. (https://twitter.com/ADL/status/1593714819932332034) Their numbers show that in the first two weeks of Musk's takeover, the percentage of tweets that action was taken on dropped from 60% to only 30%.

https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-far-right-figures-exploit-recent-changes-twitter