According to a new report from The New York Times, hate speech has increased on Twitter after Elon Musk's purchase of the platform.
"...slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site," The Times report stated.
The findings come from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League, and other groups that monitor social media. The researchers claim that they never have seen such a sharp increase in hate speech.
“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.”
But Musk is outright disputing The Times' report, calling it, "Utterly false."
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In a Twitter post presumably in response to The Times' report, Musk shared a graph showing that Hate speech impressions "continue to decline, despite significant user growth!"
"Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity," Musk wrote, adding that Twitter will make such data available to the public weekly. "There are about 500M tweets per day & billions of impressions, so hate speech impressions are <0.1% of what’s seen on Twitter!"
Read the full report over at The New York Times.