USC Information Sciences Institute: “In an analysis of Twitter using natural language processing and AI techniques, researchers found that in the period of time since October 2022:

• Hateful users have become more hateful.
• Hate has increased overall.
• There has been no meaningful change in the quantity of bots.

Computer scientist Keith Burghardt at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a research institute of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has been studying social media for five years, and specifically studying online hate for the last year.  Among other things, he has quantified how hateful online communities in Reddit increase the hate speech of new members; developed techniques to detect hateful subreddits and determine how subreddit members’ early interactions affect their activity within the group; and found ways to understand how online extremism occurs and predict anti-vaccine users on Twitter. His latest paper, Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots, quantifies hate and bots on Twitter. It has been peer-reviewed and accepted as a poster paper in the 2023 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). When Elon Musk purchased Twitter on October 27th, 2022, two of his stated goals were to have less restrictive content moderation and to remove spam bots. In this paper, Burghardt and his fellow researchers set out to look at the impact of the former, and the success of the latter…”