Elon Musk’s effort to buy Twitter, which has been going on since April, took place on October 28. Musk has been on the agenda many times with his posts and firing of executives in just a few hours after purchasing Twitter.
On the other hand, what many Twitter users and employees feared came true with Musk’s purchase. With the acquisition of the platform by Elon Musk, Twitter began to flood with tens of thousands of Tweets containing hate speech and racist expressions.
Racist rhetoric on Twitter increased 500% in just 12 hours after purchase:
The first name to shed light on the increasing racist discourse on Twitter was the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI). The institute announced that 12 hours after Elon Musk bought Twitter, the use of the racist word “N****” increased by 500%.
On the other hand, NCRI made a statement pointing out that this increase was planned. NCRI shared that they have seen various posts on 4chan, one of the largest forums, encouraging the use of such expressions on Twitter.
A statement came from the Twitter official:
Twitter’s head of security, Yoel Roth, announced that Tweets containing the aforementioned expressions were shared by only a certain number of accounts in his post on his own account. In other words, these Tweets were deliberately shared by a group of people.
“Over the last 48 hours, we’ve seen a small number of accounts post tons of Tweets containing slurs and other derogatory terms. To give you a sense of scale: More than 50,000 consecutive Tweets using a specific insult came from just 300 accounts.
Almost all of these accounts are false. We have taken action to ban users involved in this trolling campaign and will continue to work to resolve this issue in the coming days to make Twitter safe and pleasant for everyone.”
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