On Oct. 28 2022, Elon Musk took over the social network Twitter. Since taking over Musk has done some controversial things like firing several top executives, including previous CEO Parag Agrawal. But the most controversial new thing Musk has done under his leadership is making hate speech much easier to post without getting taken down or banned.

In my personal opinion, I believe Twitter should have just stuck to the hate speech program the way it was before. I have seen many ugly words on Twitter posted since Musk took over and it’s disgusting to see such hateful nasty things posted to the public. No one ever complained about Twitter’s hate speech until now. 

This has caused a massive load of offensive slurs and hate speech all over twitter.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After Musk took over the average of slurs against black Americans skyrocketed to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against the LGTBQ community appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Musk took over. After Musk took over the slur average against the LGTBQ community rose to 3,964 times a day.

The Anti-Defamation League,  filed reports of antisemitic tweets to Twitter and keeps track of which posts are removed, they said the company had gone from taking action on 60 percent of the tweets it reported to only 30 percent.

Sometimes social apps can tend to be very strict with taking down posts that can be seen as hateful, especially with minors, but Twitter has not been even close to strict. Now I personally don’t think the app should be too strict necessarily,  but I think it needs to have the boundaries it had before Musk took over.

I think Twitter needs to go back to its regular ways. In my opinion, Musk has created many issues but no solutions. One solution Musk could do is try to get more employees in the company to implement more boundaries back into Twitter. Not only did he fire lots of staff but hundreds of employees resigned from the company after Musk issued an ultimatum demanding they commit to “extremely hardcore” work.

Twitter needs to get back on track and get more boundaries on hateful speech.