Musk watch: Twitter is great now if you absolutely love slurs

Broadly, there were two responses to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter last week. There were those who believed Twitter would soon become truly unendurable, and those who believed it couldn’t get much worse than it currently is.

Turns out the latter were wrong.

Musk has long portrayed himself as a free speech absolutist and decidedly anti-snowflake, and since he took over, some of the viler elements of the app are planning to test just how deep that commitment to unfettered expression runs. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, a group that analyses hundreds of millions of social media posts, instances of the “N-word” on the app spiked nearly 500% over the 12 hours following confirmation of Musk’s takeover.

Further, according to The Washington Post:

One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 700 times and liked more than 5000 times. It was tweeted Thursday night and remained online more than 16 hours later.

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

QAnon and anti-LGBTIQA+ groups have also celebrated the new ownership.

Meanwhile, Musk has done his bit to address concerns that there will be an uptick in right-wing misinformation under his watch by… sharing a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Yep, acting on the humility and love of humanity that apparently motivated his purchase of the hellsite, he directed his followers to a notorious fake news outlet making evidence-free claims about the motivations behind the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. Musk has since deleted the tweet.