# Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.04129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [MetaHate: A Dataset for Unifying Efforts on Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06526/) (2024)
- [AI-Generated Faces in the Real World: A Large-Scale Case Study of Twitter Profile Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14244/) (2024)
- [Addressing the regulatory gap: moving towards an EU AI audit ecosystem beyond the AI Act by including civil society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07904/) (2024)
- [Decoding Hate: Exploring Language Models' Reactions to Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00775/) (2024)
- [Towards Efficient and Explainable Hate Speech Detection via Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13698/) (2024)
- [Examining Multimodal Gender and Content Bias in ChatGPT-4o](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19140/) (2024)
- [Bridging Gaps in Hate Speech Detection: Meta-Collections and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Iberian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11167/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Reveal Information Operation Goals, Tactics, and Narrative Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03688/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.