Musk bought Twitter for £38.1 billion and transformed it into X (Image: Getty)
Scientists have blasted over a major change seen on X – formerly known as – in the months after he bought the social media site.
The boss acquired Twitter for a staggering £38.1 billion in October 2022 and insisted that he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber for hate and division.
But analysis suggests the rate of age speech on X was around 50% higher for several months after the purchase.
The amount of bot activity also did not appear to decline, the study found, despite Mr Musk pledging to “defeat the spam bots”.
Researcher Daniel Hickey, of the University of , Berkeley, and his colleagues looked at English-language hate speech and inauthentic activity that occurred up to June 2023.
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They found a spike in hate speech began just before Musk’s purchase, and continued until May 2023. This included greater use of specific homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs.
The average number of “likes” on hate posts also increased by 70%, the study found.
Writing in the journal PLOS One, Hickey and his colleagues warned that “the long-term increase in hate speech, and in the prevalence of potentially inauthentic accounts, are concerning”.
They added: “These factors can undermine safe and democratic online environments, and increase the risk of online harms.”
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The researchers noted that there was no universally agreed-upon definition of hate speech, but it is generally identified by looking for text that contains attacks or offensive language that targets specific identify groups.
This can include people of certain races, gender identities or sexual orientations.
They added: “Defining hate speech remains a challenge in hate speech detection, as reliability is often low in datasets with annotated examples of hate speech.”