Retweeting Twitter Hate Speech After Musk Acquisition

Using data collected from one-week periods in 2021 and 2022, both before and after billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, we generated Twitter retweet networks to examine the connection between Musk and hate groups as designated by the US Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in three separate hate ideologies: white nationalists / alt-right, anti-Semitics, and anti-LGBTQ. Utilizing the configuration model to generate random retweet networks, we successfully found a direct link between Twitter users who retweet Musk and users who retweet several SPLC-defined hate groups. Results show that Musk’s Tweets and general rhetoric have a potential appeal to hateful users on Twitter.