Hate speech on X was consistently 50% higher for at least eight months after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform, new research has found.
The research looked at the prevalence of overt hate speech including a wide range of racist, homophobic and transphobic slurs.
The study, published today in PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers led by Daniel Hickney from the University of California, Berkeley.
On October 27 2022, Musk officially purchased X (then known as Twitter) for US$44 billion and became its CEO. His takeover was accompanied by promises to reduce hate speech on the platform and tackle bots and other inauthentic accounts.
But after he bought X, Musk made several changes to the platform to reduce content moderation. For example, in November 2022 he fired much of the company’s full time workforce. He also fired outsourced content moderators who tracked abuse on X, despite research showing social medial platforms with high levels of content moderation contain less hate speech.
This new study is the first to show that this wasn’t an anomaly.
Hate speech including homophobic, racist and transphobic slurs was significantly higher on X after Elon Musk bought the platform. The black lines represent standard errors. Hickey et al., 2025 / PLOS One
More than 4 million posts
The study examined 4.7 million English language posts on X from the beginning of 2022 through to June 9 2023. This period includes the ten months before Musk bought X and the eight months afterwards.
The study measured overt hate speech, the meaning of which was clear to anyone who saw it – speech attacking identity groups or using toxic language. It did not measure covert types of hate speech, such as coded language used by some extremist groups to spread hate but plausibly deny doing so.
As well as measuring the amount of hate speech on X, the study also measured how much other users engaged with this material by liking it.
The researchers’ access to X data was cut off during the study due to a policy change by the platform, replacing free access to approved academic researchers with payment options which are generally unaffordable. This significantly hampered their ability to collect sample posts. But they don’t mention whether it affected their results.
A clear increase in hate
The study found “a clear increase” in the average number of posts containing hate speech following Musk’s purchase of X. Specifically, the volume of posts containing hate speech was “consistently” 50% higher after Musk took over X compared to beforehand – a jump from an estimated average of 2,179 to 3,246 posts containing hate speech per week.
Transphobic slurs saw the highest increase, rising from an average of roughly 115 posts per week before Musk’s acquisition to an average of 418 afterwards.
The level of user engagement with posts containing hate speech also increased under Musk’s watch. For example, the weekly rate at which hate speech content was liked by users jumped by 70%.
The researchers say these results suggest either hate speech wasn’t taken down, hateful users became more active, the platform’s algorithm unintentionally promoted hate speech to users who like such content – or a combination of these possibilities.
The study also detected no decrease in the activity of inauthentic accounts on X. In fact, it found a “potential increase” in the number of bot accounts partly based on a large upswing in posts promoting cryptocurrency, which are typically associated with bots.
An important data-driving deep dive
There were a number of limitations to the study. For example, it only measured hate speech posts in English, which accounts for only 31% of posts on the platform.
Even so, the study is an important, data-driven deep dive into the state of X. It shows it is a platform where hate speech is prolific. It also shows Musk has failed to fulfil his earlier promises to address problems on X such as hate speech and bot activity.
As Musk himself said at the White House earlier this week: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected”.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Adam Johnson (Column, 2/3/25): “The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that ‘DOGE’ was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to ‘cut costs,’ ‘find savings’ and ‘increase efficiencies.’”
Having spent nearly $300 million to purchase the US presidency for Donald Trump, Elon Musk now feels entitled to do with it as he pleases. Just how radically Musk plans to remake the country was conveyed to the American people only after the election, when Musk stood behind the presidential seal on Inauguration Day and gave a Nazi salute. Then did it again. Maybe that sort of thing was OK to do in apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up, but it’s jarring to see here in the United States.
Reporters initially struggled to meet the moment (FAIR.org, 2/4/25), downplaying Musk’s salute (the Washington Post described a “high-energy speech“), as well as his broader agenda, which Musk now openly declares a “revolution,” and consists of an unelected billionaire wresting control of nearly the entire executive branch of government. Early media reports went along with Musk’s “efficiency” mantra (Column, 2/3/25), but more recently reporters have started to find their footing, and the dangers of Musk’s project are being conveyed. Sort of.
“Reporters on the battlefield are doing what they can” to expose the radical nature of Trump’s second term, writes media columnist Oliver Darcy (Status, 2/5/25). “The news generals back in the command center, however, are largely abdicating their duties.”
‘Musk’s audacious goal’
Nowhere is this discrepancy more apparent than at the Washington Post, a newspaper famed for opposing a prior Republican president with an expansive view of executive power. These days, however, even as Post reporters like Jeff Stein are busy breaking stories (e.g., 1/28/25, 2/8/25) about the Trump power grab, the paper’s higher-ups are careful not to offend the president or Musk. The Post is even, incredibly, calling on the Constitution-defying billionaire duo to push further.
As Elon Musk seizes extraconstitutional control of the federal budget, Washington Post editors (2/7/25) urge him to use that power to go after Social Security and Medicare.
“To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts,” the Post editorial board (2/7/25) wrote, “Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”
While claiming it wants Trump to “erect guardrails” for Musk, the Post urges the president to abandon one of the only guardrails he established—the cutting of Social Security and Medicare, which Trump repeatedly said he wouldn’t do, but recently started waffling on.
To be clear, the Post has long called for cutting so-called entitlements (FAIR.org, 11/1/11, 6/15/23). But to do so at this moment—by encouraging a coup attempt to push further—is quite extraordinary.
The Post’s move comes as its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family, while coaching his paper to take a less critical approach in its coverage (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). Bezos’s ingratiation toward Trump started prior to the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).
Good news for X from Amazon
The Washington Post (2/4/25) reports on “divergent views among Jewish leaders in how to respond to Musk”: Some object to his ” Nazi-esque salute and Holocaust jokes,” others appreciate his censorship of criticism of Israel.
Bezos has also been busy making nice with Musk, his longtime rival for most powerful man on Earth and in space. On both fronts, Musk now has a decided edge, aided by his control over much of the US government, which both men’s sprawling empires rely on for billions of dollars in contracts.
With Musk’s hand on the public-money spigot, Bezos apparently did him a favor. After Musk openly heiled Hitler, Jewish leaders renewed calls to boycott Musk’s social media platform, X (Washington Post, 2/4/25). “To advertisers—including Google, Amazon and the ADL: Pull your ads now,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “The pressure is working. X’s financial difficulties prove it.”
But the boycott’s pressure was countered by Bezos’s company. “[X] got good news last week, with Amazon reportedly planning to hike its advertising on the site,” the Post (2/4/25) reported, without mentioning Bezos.
While X’s finances “were once so bad that Musk floated the idea of filing for bankruptcy,” things are suddenly looking up, the Financial Times (2/12/25) reported:
Musk famously admitted to overpaying for Twitter after he bought the social media platform known now as X for $44 billion in 2022. But the billionaire’s foray into government has coincided with a turnaround in X’s fortunes, as advertisers, including Amazon, flock back to the platform.
‘Lemmings leaping in unison’
Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/24/25) likened those who condemned Musk’s Nazi gesture to “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff”—because it’s suicidal to notice fascism in high places?
It wasn’t just Bezos’s company that threw Musk a lifeline, but also his newspaper. An initial Post headline (1/20/25), which omitted mention of Musk’s Nazi salute, read “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.” The following day, Post columnist Megan McArdle, echoing the ADL, downgraded Musk’s salute to an “awkward gesture,” the same phrase Post columnist Kathleen Parker used to dismiss those who saw something more sinister as “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff” (Washington Post, 1/24/25).
Interestingly, one of the most vociferous “lemmings” was Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who brilliantly called out Musk’s Nazi salute, but on CNN, and noticeably not in the Post, except once in passing (1/30/25).
Musk responded to Rampell’s CNN appearance by threatening to sue her in a post (1/27/25) to his over 200 million X followers.
I noted at the top that Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump, but that’s only part of the story. Musk also provided inestimable support by transforming X into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Personally, when I logged onto X during the campaign, I routinely saw Musk’s pro-Trump tweets at the top of my feed, even though I didn’t follow Musk at the time.
Since the election, Musk ’s gifts to Trump have continued. X recently agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the company, even though the case was dismissed in 2022. Trump was still appealing the ruling two-and-a-half years later when a deal was cut. “The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number,” the Wall Street Journal (2/13/25) reported.
‘Cheering for change’
New York Times (2/11/25): Many of the federal agencies targeted by Musk “were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.”
It’s quite something for Elon Musk—the world’s richest human and one of the largest government contractors—to gleefully slash public spending benefiting others. Especially when, by one measure, “virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help,” CNN (11/20/24) reported.
While Musk claims to wield a populist’s pitchfork as he attacks “the bureaucracy,” a closer look reveals the work of an oligarch’s scalpel. Musk’s coup team—called DOGE, and consisting mostly of twentysomething male engineers, several of whom appear to share Musk’s racist ideology (New York Times, 2/7/25)—is targeting the federal agencies investigating Musk’s companies, which in addition to X, include Tesla and SpaceX.
“President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting—or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit,” read the opening lines of a New York Times story (2/11/25):
At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [Trump’s] moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.
While Trump claims Musk is “not gaining anything” from the arrangement, and Musk says the same, Wall Street sees things differently. Even as Musk says he’s turning his “efficiency” revolution to the Pentagon—the only federal agency never to pass an audit, and where any honest attempt to rein in government spending would begin—stocks for armsmaking companies associated with Musk are surging, while those without ties to him languish. “Palantir, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and robotics and AI specialist Anduril Industries, are cheering for change,” the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25) reported.
In other words, having seized control of the levers of government, an oligarch will now be directing funding to himself and his cronies. That’s Wall Street’s view, anyhow.
It seems to be Bezos’s as well. With Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, competing for billions in government contracts, it makes perfect business sense for Bezos to cozy up to Musk and Trump. From a journalistic perspective, however, it’s nothing short of a disaster, one that’s playing out daily in the pages of the WashingtonPost.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
The EU has come under growing pressure to take action after a series of forays by Musk into European politics. Photograph: Benoît Tessier/Reuters
Musk’s company has been accused of manipulating systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility
The European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk’s social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation.
The EU’s executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its “recommender system”, which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February.
X has been under investigation since December 2023 under the EU’s content law – known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) – over how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The company has been accused of manipulating the platform’s systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups.
The EU has come under growing pressure in recent weeks to take action after a series of interventions by Musk into European politics. Musk, who will be a part of Donald Trump’s administration in the US, has angered many on the continent with attacks on its leaders as well as expressions of support for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
Across the 2000s, a series of child sex exploitation cases affected British towns, including Telford, Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham, scarring the lives of hundreds of children. In 2011, Times journalist Andrew Norfolk reported that networks – so-called “grooming gangs” – of largely British Asian men of Pakistani heritage had trafficked and raped hundreds of mainly girls and young women.
These are facts that are widely known in the UK and have been the subject of multiple investigations. The 2014 Jay report found that authorities had been slow to act, sometimes for fear of being accused of racism.
Police had in some cases blamed victims, criminalising children as prostitutes. Alexis Jay, who also led the 2022 independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, has noted the “appalling and lifelong effects” of abuse on victims.
Elon Musk – the billionaire owner of social media platform X and incoming lead on US government efficiency – has, it seems, just found out about this devastating national scandal.
In a series of posts on X, Musk politicised these crimes to denounce Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “evil”, and to call for a new general election in the UK. He also reposted the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, calling for his release from prison where he is serving 18 months for contempt of court.
Musk portrayed Robinson as campaigning to expose the “truth” about grooming, as though the story had not been subject to widespread investigation, media coverage and public debate.
Of course, women’s rights within our criminal justice and political systems desperately need to be improved. But, Musk is no cheerleader for women and there is no evidence that he is “genuinely incensed” by child sexual exploitation.
Musk has not shown an interest in women’s rights or sexual abuse before. If he had, he might not have accepted a job in the administration of Donald Trump, a man found liable for sexual abuse.
Musk’s newfound interest evidently isn’t in all sex offences – apparently just those perpetrated by “Muslim men” against white women. He has not shown any obvious interest in cases where Muslim women were also abused, nor does he have much if anything to say about abuse perpetrated by white men.
He appears to support women’s protections when they are politically useful to him in fanning division – a common far-right tactic.
Musk has supported far-right actors, reinstating Tommy Robinson to X in November 2023, just in time for him to organise a mass rally at the Cenotaph in London, stoking division and, as I noted at the time, threatening democracy. He has also recently written in support of Germany’s anti-Islam party the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and hosted its leader Alice Weidel in live discussion on X.
By publicising the UK’s “grooming gangs” scandal, Musk has aligned himself with a gendered narrative: it is men’s duty to protect women – even when it means breaking rules or using force. This gender binary – strong men must be ready to use force to protect weak women, especially from hostile alien men – is the core narrative of patriarchal, nationalist, ultra nationalist and also Nazi groups.
It is highly racialised – only vulnerable white women matter – and it relates to class, in that it regards white, liberal women as betraying working-class girls. Musk has singled out Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and “wicked witch”, thereby putting her at risk.
Exploiting women victims, protecting patriarchy
The recent attack on Phillips reveals Musk’s call to protect women for what it really is: a means to protect powerful men. Feminist women are understood as fair targets, because they challenge a gender order in which men have natural dominance.
Patriarchy protects (some) men by positioning men’s role as leaders and fighters, protectors and providers, for nation and family, wives and children. This is protection without care, which is gendered as feminine, and weak. It is protection as a means of control.
Musk is not in a position of moral authority regarding either protection or care. Before his takeover, social media platform Twitter appeared to care for workers, prioritising health and wellbeing.
The ethos of X is the opposite: Musk has gutted staff numbers, and transformed workplace practices aimed at safeguarding both employees and users. He now promises to do the same across the US government as head of efficiency in the Trump administration.
Social media has always been a space in which women are at risk of both personal and structural misogyny; these harms are amplified through Musk’s approach to X. Musk has sought to amplify the voices of influencers who decry women’s rights.
Musk has reposted Andrew Tate, who police in the UK have linked to an epidemic of misogyny and violence against women, and who has faced charges of rape and sex trafficking. He has allowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to use X to promote the phrase “your body, my choice”. There is no real protection here, no care – only white men’s control of women.
Race to the bottom
Where Musk leads, others follow. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has recently ceded fact-checking to the “community”, and noted the need for a more “masculine” and “aggressive” corporate culture. Zuckerberg also ended the company’s diversity equity and inclusion policy, which minorities rely upon for some degree of workplace protection.
In an age of strong-man politics, where young men are choosing role models from a marketplace of competing masculinities, hypermasculinity wins. Young men aged 18-29 voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the US elections, supported by men’s rights activists in the online “manosphere”. Musk knows this.
Musk has money and social media power, but he is a “tech bro” – a “nerd”. Exploiting the horror of British child sexual exploitation scandals has enabled him to attempt to assert himself as a protector of women – a hero of the forgotten.
He has amplified a far-right political position, and the voices of far-right actors he believes embody this, like Robinson. But Musk has no moral authority to speak on the protection of women, or on care more generally.
Those British politicians cynically lauding Musk’s apparently protective stance on women to attack the government – and the UK’s parliamentary democracy – should recognise this is nothing but hypocrisy. And, from that perspective, Musk has no authority to dictate the political agenda on girls’ and women’s rights in Britain, or anywhere else.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives the inaugural speech during the opening event of the “España en Libertad” (Spain in Freedom) commemorations, held at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid on January 8, 2025. (Photo: Guillermo Gutierrez Carrascal/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again.”
Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to wade into the political battles of several European countries did not go unnoticed by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who used a Wednesday event marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as an opportunity to warn against Musk’s recent commentary.
Without naming Musk, Sánchez warned that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s leadership of an “international reactionary” movement is a threat “that should challenge all of us who believe in democracy.”
The Spanish leader spoke days after Musk—an ally and megadonor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump who he’s selected to co-lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency—commented on an article that stated foreign nationals in Catalonia are disproportionately convicted for sexual assault, writing, “Wow” in response.
“Foreign nationals are neither better nor worse than Spanish citizens in terms of criminality,” Sánchez said in response to Musk’s commentary, following his remarks at the event Wednesday by rebuking the man he referred to as “the richest man on the planet.”
He pointed to Musk’s recent perceived interference in Germany’s upcoming snap elections, which are scheduled for February. Musk has written an op-ed in support of Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration right-wing party that the German domestic intelligence agency has designated a “suspected extremist” group.
“You don’t have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco’s regime and fear that this regression will be repeated.”
One candidate aligned with AfD said last year that Nazi paramilitaries under Adolf Hitler’s regime were “not all criminals.”
Musk, said the Spanish prime minister on Wednesday, “openly attacks our institutions, stirs up hatred, and openly calls for the support of the heirs of Nazism in Germany’s upcoming elections.”
“You don’t have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco’s regime and fear that this regression will be repeated,” he said at the commemoration at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. “Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again.”
Musk’s recent commentary on Spain played on similar narratives to those he’s recently pushed in the United Kingdom, attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labour Party leaders for allegedly not being aggressive enough in prosecuting child sexual exploitation cases involving suspects who were originally from Pakistan.
Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have all spoken out against Musk’s recent foray into European politics and accused him of spreading disinformation, with Scholz telling one media outlet, “Don’t feed the troll.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Wednesday called on the European Commission to protect its member states against political interference by Musk.
“Either the European Commission applies with the greatest firmness the laws that we have given ourselves to protect our public space, or it does not do so and then it will have to agree to give back the capacity to do so to the E.U. member states,” Barrot told France Inter radio. “We have to wake up.”
Members of European Parliament on Wednesday called on the European Commission to investigate whether the social media platform X, which Musk owns, can legally promote Musk’s posts on the app under the E.U.’s Digital Services Act. Last year, the tech news site Platformer reported the X algorithm has been reconfigured to amplify Musk’s comments.
The pressure from MEPs and recent comments from European leaders came as Musk prepared to host a livestream conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X Thursday.
“I don’t understand why people believe that free speech is not affected by the concentration of opinion-making power in the hands of the few,” MEP Damian Boeselager of the pan-European Volt party, a candidate for the Bundestag in the German election, told The Guardian. “For me, that has rather illiberal, autocratic tendencies, rather than liberal tendencies, when one voice is so much more powerful than all the others.”
