Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n-----s … now, thank you elon,” another said.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a group that analyzes hundreds of millions of messages across social media, said use of the n-word on the app spiked nearly 500 percent over the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was finalized.
By Friday afternoon, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ messages had become increasingly prominent, including from accounts calling for the harassment and misnaming of transgender people or the use of terms, like “groomer,” to insinuate that they sexually recruit children.
Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT, called for Musk to remove the “shadow ban” from her account and appealed to his stated commitments to “free speech.”