Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots
Open accessAbstract
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.
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The lower accuracy on Twitter may be due to LLMs' emphasis on training with high-quality, non-offensive data, thereby deprioritizing colloquial and misleading language prevalent on Twitter.
“This effect may be due to the LLMs' emphasis on training with high-quality, non-offensive data, thereby deprioritizing the frequently observed colloquial and misleading language prevalent on Twitter [27,64].”
From Sentiment Analysis in the Age of Generative AI (2024) · cites this paper as [27]
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References 24 · Cited by 100
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- Authors
- Hickey, D., Schmitz, M., Fessler, D., Smaldino, P. E., Muric, G., & Burghardt, K.
- Affiliations
- Oregon State University (US)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
- Published
- 2023-06-02
- Volume
- 17
- Pages
- 1133-1137
- ISSN
- 2162-3449 (ISSN-L)
- 2334-0770
- OpenAlex
- W4380302041
- Cited by
- 100
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 43 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 13
- FWCI
- 17.63
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (2051101)
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (HR001121C0169, HR0011260595)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- Elon Musk, Twitter acquisition, hate speech, spam bots, astroturfing, content moderation, platform governance, online communities, social media
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