Has Twitter Really Changed Since Elon Musk Took Over?

From NATIONAL REVIEW.com.

We are told that Twitter is experiencing an explosion of hate speech of every form:

• Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.
• Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.
• And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

I notice that since Musk took over, my Twitter experience remains unchanged. Maybe I’m just lucky, but if Twitter really is suddenly experiencing an explosion of hatred, racism, antisemitism, anti-gay rhetoric, etc., it’s a little weird that I haven’t gotten any of those “Trump will put you in the ovens/Jews are parasites on society” replies and direct messages that I did back in 2015 and 2016. Then again, perhaps I’ve muted so many hateful little twerps that I’m literally not seeing those kinds of Tweets.

We do have anecdotal evidence that since news of Musk’s purchase, prominent conservative voices have seen a jump in followers, and prominent liberal voices have seen their number of followers and engagement drop. It’s likely some left-of-center users, probably casual users, quit Twitter and moved off to other social media platforms like Mastodon. And it’s likely that news that Musk was taking over Twitter spurred some conservatives to create new Twitter account. And it’s possible that some of the new users of Twitter are among those flinging the feces, and there are fewer left-of-center users around to report them. So a contention that Twitter is experiencing a modest uptick in hate speech, name-calling, obnoxious behavior, etc. passes the smell test.

But my B.S. detector goes off when I see precise statistics, for a bunch of reasons. How well are these self-appointed watchdog organizations monitoring all of Twitter? Users send, on average, 500 million tweets a day. Users sending 3,900 racist tweets in a day is a bad thing, but that would still represent 0.0000078 percent of all tweets. No wonder the average user isn’t noticing it. For perspective, the U.S. has 24,000 homicides per year out of a population about 330 million people, meaning 0.000072 percent of all Americans are murdered in a given year. In other words, racist tweets make up a smaller share of all tweets than murder victims make up a share of all Americans.

How do they define racist, antisemitic, and anti-gay rhetoric? If they’re using artificial intelligence or monitoring software, how well can that software differentiate a hateful use of the n-word from, say, quoting hip-hop lyrics? Can it differentiate between a tasteless joke and an indisputably hateful slur?

And how much does it matter if someone with only a few followers is vomiting his rage into the void? How much of this is worth worrying about on a platform with block and mute features? The reason you see so many horrible comments on social media is because they offer people a combination that was previously rare in human experience: anonymity and the ability to reach a wide audience. This allows people to express all of the taboo, controversial, or antisocial thoughts that would usually bring negative consequences if expressed explicitly in offline life. It’s a formula to bring out people’s inner jerk, and it’s more or less baked into the cake of the user experience. The only factor that might mitigate it would be eliminating anonymous users, but then a lot of people wouldn’t want to use Twitter.

But all of that complicates the preferred narrative: “Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the hate-mongers took over.” Because Twitter was such an online earthly paradise before then.