Among the issues discussed during Elon Musk’s interview with the BBC was the spread of hate speech and misinformation on the platform.
“Do you see an increase in hate speech?” Mr Musk said. “I don’t.”
He asked our reporter James Clayton for specific examples of hateful content.
When he couldn’t locate individual messages, Mr Musk said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about… You just lied.”
It has drawn heavy criticism on Twitter itself, mainly – but certainly not exclusively – from right-wing and far-right accounts.
But there is both in-depth study and anecdotal evidence to suggest hate speech has increased under Mr Musk’s tenure.
Several fringe figures banned under the previous leadership were reinstated.
These include Andrew Anglin, founder of neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, and Liz Crokin, one of the biggest propagators of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Other lesser-known Twitter users have taken advantage of the new ownership. An account with a racist slur in the username could get a blue tick. Another was bought by a neo-Nazi who tweeted videos of himself reciting “Mein Kampf” – Hitler’s autobiography.
According to a study by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), anti-Semitic tweets doubled from June 2022 to February 2023. The same study found that deactivations of such content also increased, but not enough to keep up with the increase.
The ISD also noted a nearly 70% increase in Islamic State accounts – a problem that was once a big concern on Twitter but has been reduced to a trickle by account suspensions.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a London-based campaigning group, found that abuse increased significantly following Mr Musk’s takeover.
Our own reporting also provides some clues. The BBC analyzed over 1,100 previously suspended Twitter accounts recovered under Mr Musk. A third appeared to violate Twitter’s own policies. Some of the most extreme featured rapes and drawings depicting child sexual abuse. Such content was also a scourge on Twitter for years before Mr Musk acquired the platform.
But a BBC investigation heard from Twitter insiders raising concerns the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-coordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation.
A few problems spoil things. For one thing, there is no blanket definition of hate speech in American law, which is generally much more permissive than other countries due to the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
After all, this is a country where civil rights attorneys sued in 1978 to defend the right of a neo-Nazi group to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived.
Mr Musk’s views on free speech – which are mainstream in the United States – may have encouraged people worried about a ban to speak more freely. In other words, we don’t know if the surge identified by researchers will continue.
Moderation is clearly still happening on Twitter, and Mr Musk himself has vigorously pushed back on the studies and investigations.
He has argued that he has taken a politically neutral line – that not only right-wing accounts have been restored, but also some left-wing accounts that were previously suspended.
“This is not a right wing takeover but a centrist takeover,” he tweeted.
And, he argues, his strategy is working. In December, he tweeted that hate speech had fallen by a third.
Researchers and journalists have focused on the most extreme content – not mere jokes or insults, but highly offensive language. However, critics have pointed out that Mr Musk’s own definition of hate speech is not clear.
And he recently ended free access to Twitter’s application programming interface, or API — data that researchers use to study the platform.
Without such data, it will be difficult to objectively study the issue in the future. Mr Musk has previously said he increased transparency by making Twitter’s algorithm open source.
Mr Musk said his efforts to take down bots – automated accounts – have reduced misinformation on Twitter since his takeover. And he pointed to the site’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to comment and add context to tweets themselves.
“My experience is that there tends to be less misinformation than more,” he told our reporter.
Some outside experts disagree. An early study by NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, found that engagement with popular accounts spreading misinformation skyrocketed after Mr Musk’s acquisition.
In the week after his Twitter acquisition, the most popular, untrustworthy accounts saw a nearly 60 percent increase in engagement in the form of likes and retweets, according to the survey.
NewsGuard has itself been accused of left-leaning.
Science Feedback, a left-leaning fact-checker, found that “super-mongers” of misinformation — defined as accounts that regularly post popular tweets with links to known misinformation — have increased significantly since Mr Musk’s acquisition.
The BBC’s own analysis found false anti-vax claims and denial of the 2020 US election result among the more than 1,000 accounts recovered.
Mr Musk says he’s on the side of truth and believes his strategy will make Twitter better in the long run.
“The acid test is whether people use the system and think it’s a good source of truth, or they don’t,” Mr Musk told our reporter. “And no system will perfect in its pursuit of truth, but I think we can be the best at being the least inaccurate.”
Mr Musk said he prefers “ordinary people” information from journalists and at several points challenged the BBC’s technology correspondent with questions of his own.
But Mr Musk himself was not entirely accurate when describing the BBC’s coverage. He once claimed the BBC had not reported on the side effects of the Covid vaccine.
But the BBC has reported proven very rare side effects when they have surfaced and examples can be found online – for example here, here and here.
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