Antisemitism on Twitter has more than doubled since Elon Musk took over
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel )
In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a surge in hateful conduct," which its then safety chief put down to a focused, short-term trolling campaign." New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.
Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and October 26, 2022, the day before Twitter's acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed plausibly antisemitic"-that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of the term as a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews."
But from October 27 until February 9, 2023, the average was 12,762-an increase of 105 percent. In all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as plausibly antisemitic" over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to February 9, 2023.