Hate speech dramatically increased on X under Elon Musk's watch, researchers say

While Mr. Goldhaber said he wanted to remain hopeful, he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online, and politicians will continue to stake out more extreme positio... See more

Researchers’ findings suggest X made ‘platform-level’ changes to boost Musk and other conservatives’ posts when he endorsed Donald Trump.

Their rise to prominence tracks with a dramatic decrease in moderation of hateful content on the platform, which dropped from 1 million moderated accounts in 2021 to only 2,361 accounts in the most recent 2024 X transparency report.

Democratic governance of digital platforms

Most brands do not want to be associated with hate speech and bot farms, but they are. It is easy to look the other way in such a technically complicated market, but marketers have a responsibility. Brands become complicit by remaining silent.

Policymakers and activists are pushing to reform digital platfor... See more

X has turned into a bullhorn for “anti-woke” sentiments used to boost Musk’s political messaging, Meta has abandoned its fact checking in deference to possible Trump retribution against the Zuckerberg empire; Starlink, TikTok, and Nvidia/TSCM are becoming geopolitical bargaining chips in nativist industrial trade wars; Network States are gaining po

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And bear in mind, the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. Advertisers don’t want their brands and products displayed next to extreme or hateful content — a point that many made explicitly last summer during a high-profile boycott by a number of household-name brands.

Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, implied that his company’s business model would largely obviate the need for content moderation. “We give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority,” he wrote. But even a platform that... See more

companies are ignoring very real harms to humans. “This is probably the first time in our entire technology careers that we actually see this much conflict,”