Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover made the platform an even more noxious misinformation machine

For about as long as today’s high school seniors have been alive, Twitter has served as a public square for the political discourse of the day.

An oft-heard refrain is “Twitter isn’t real life.” And that was true to a degree. Twitter simply never had the reach of longtime heavyweights such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, or newcomers like TikTok. But it didn’t necessarily have to. There’s a reason former President Donald Trump was tweeting through his 2020 election loss right up until his account was banned on Jan. 6, 2021.

Now known as X in the wake of its controversial takeover by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the website formerly known as Twitter has descended, by virtually every measure, into a bigger cesspool of misinformation than it has ever been.

According to GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index for 2023, X ranked the worst out of the major social media platforms when it came to fighting anti-LGBTQ hate. In GLAAD’s scoring mechanism, the site dropped 12 points, from 45% to 33%, between 2022 and 2023. And thanks to changes made by Musk, it’s become substantially more difficult for researchers hoping to uncover the networks behind disinformation or to study the scale of the problem on the platform. In February, Twitter said it would no longer provide free access to its data, which academics had used to study human behavior on social media, putting a hard brake on research.

Before the changes, analyses from anti-hate groups such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate — which Musk recently threatened to sue, claiming that the Center was trying to benefit foreign governments and Twitter’s competitors with its research — and the Anti-Defamation League found that bigoted speech surged after Musk’s October takeover of the site.

Twitter continued its transformation in the months after, with the site quietly tweaking its rules in April to allow misgendering and deadnaming of trans people.

On the first day of Pride month, Musk said in a tweet that using incorrect pronouns “is definitely allowed.” Later that month, he declared the words “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs.

The consequences of the new Twitter, although sources warned against idealizing the site pre-Musk, were clear by the end of the month, when an analysis by Media Matters for America showed six of the top 10 accounts with the most engagement related to Pride were right-wing accounts with a history of anti-LGBTQ posts. According to the analysis, 42% of interactions with the top 1,000 Pride-related posts were earned on similar accounts known for anti-LGBTQ content.

Musk himself has also increasingly demonstrated public support for anti-trans activism, spending much of Pride month liking tweets with anti-trans views.

“I think he’s in that kind of fringe, right wing, social media echo chamber,” said Kayla Gogarty, deputy research director at Media Matters for America.

Musk’s priorities have given anti-LGBTQ hate a new home on the internet, but the consequences aren’t just online.

Dylan Mulvaney, a trans social media influencer who was the target of vitriol after appearing in a Bud Light advertisement, said she was “ridiculed in public” and even followed as a result of the controversy. Much of that vitriol, as well as calls to boycott Bud Light over the advertisement, took place on Twitter.

In an even more potentially dangerous episode, a university clinic in Oregon was targeted by a bomb threat after anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok drew attention to an incident involving a patient critical of a trans pride flag hanging in the clinic’s office.

Aspiring Twitter replacements have piqued exhausted users’ hopes, but those apps’ struggles to moderate harassment, misinformation, and disinformation leave much to be desired. One example is Threads, Meta’s “Twitter killer” that launched with much fanfare but quickly became filled with false information and hateful content as well.

Threads briefly appeared to moving toward combating misinformation by including a warning label on accounts with a history of sharing falsehoods, but backtracked and claimed it was a mistake.

Since then, Meta has simply given up on moderating Threads.

“We have seen some failures on Meta’s part in regards to Threads specifically, but we also do know they have a long track record of failing to have either adequate policies or consistently enforcing those policies,” Gogarty said. “So I think, while people are flocking there, I think they are forgetting the history that Meta has.”

Bluesky, the social media platform started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, was recently the subject of controversy after it allowed users to register usernames with racial slurs.

Brooke Binkowski — a longtime Twitter user, journalist, and disinformation expert — said she’s wary of alternative platforms, nice as they may sound, because of other platforms’ repetition of Twitter’s problems.

“I want to love Bluesky, but they’re repeating the same stupid bullshit mistakes,” Binkowski said.

Twitter, of course, had many of the same issues before the Musk era. It has long had issues with moderation, in part due to a lack of resources to adequately police every conversation, leaving it a hotbed of extremism and misinformation long before Musk exacerbated the issue.

The issues with Twitter back in the day, however, were usually not on the same scale — or the same level of vindictiveness — as the issues now. At least for LGBTQ+ people and others who could find themselves the targets of hate and disinformation, experts find X much scarier than it was before.

Musk’s instant rollback of content moderation policies is a big part of this, Gogarty said.

“I think the day that he took over, we saw a bunch of like, right wing and anti-LGBTQ Twitter accounts try putting out tweets, like, ‘oh, I can say groomer now,’ that sort of thing,” Gogarty said.

Musk has also reinstated many accounts that were banned by Twitter’s previous administration, including many that were booted for anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Musk’s rollback of moderation policies is having a domino effect in the rest of the media ecosystem, too.

Gogarty pointed to Meta, which is also dismantling some of its moderation teams.

“Unfortunately, it’s a trend we’ve always seen, in terms of some of these moderation policies have been put in place due to some external pressures and things like that,” Gogarty said. “Musk is kind of giving them a permission structure to take some of that back.”

The platform’s new tolerance for disinformation and bigotry has, however, hurt the company’s bottom line.

“Twitter/X continues to be plagued by lack of advertising revenue due to its constant instability,” Jessica Ghilani, professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh and a researcher at the Pitt Disinformation Lab, told the American Independent Foundation.

X. Corp, the company that owns Twitter, has seen its advertising revenue decline by more than 50% since March. Many brands, such as Mondolez, the multinational company that owns Oreos, Coca-Cola, and Jeep, have pulled their advertising dollars from the platform since October. A major reason for the exodus is brands’ fear that consumers could see their advertisements next to the kind of hateful and bigoted content that surged on Twitter post-Musk — a huge danger for a platform that relies on advertising spending for 90% of its revenue.

X’s budget problems, Ghilani said, are a direct consequence of Musk’s decisions.

“When Musk took over in October, he purged a lot of the workforce of Twitter that was incredibly experienced, and also the entire teams of people who were tasked with the more heavy lifting of content moderation and the safety team and the people who looked at hate speech,” Ghilani said.

In May, Musk stepped back from the CEO role and hired Linda Yaccarino, the former head of ad sales at NBCUniversal, as a replacement. It’s unclear if she’ll be able to stop the bleeding and just how much freedom she actually has to operate under Musk. In a CNBC interview, Yaccarino asserted that she has “autonomy” in her role as CEO and that advertisers should feel comfortable returning to the platform. However, in the Tweet announcing Yaccarino’s hiring, Musk said he would remain in charge of product development and technology as chairman and CTO.

But for all the financial turmoil, chaotic management, and advertiser anxiety, Twitter’s competition doesn’t seem to be capitalizing. Ghilani described Threads, which has lost more than half of its users after an initial spike according to some reports, as a “boom and a bust.” Alternatives like Bluesky as well as Mastodon, Post.news, and Threads haven’t yet supplanted X as the platform of choice for politics and news.

Behind the rebrand from Twitter to X and the apparent mismanagement, Ghilani suggested there may be a simpler motive: “In some ways, the agent of chaos aspect of X is an attempt to try to keep the name and the brand and all of the above in the forefront of people’s minds because they’re more likely to return to a platform that seems as though there’s a lot happening.”

It’s hard to say whether that is the reason people are staying, but for now at least, X continues to retain an audience.

“It’s all we know,” Binkowski said.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.