Reacción a "Hate speech has increased by 50 % on the social network X after its purchase by Elon Musk"

This study is an advance over previous research because it analyzes a longer period on X since Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, allowing the researchers to compare the content on the platform with the same period prior to the purchase. Overall, the results show that hate speech increases on X after the purchase of the platform and does so in different areas, such as racism, homophobia and transphobia, as well as increasing engagement with these messages. However, the major limitation of the study is that it cannot establish a direct causal relationship between this increase in hate and the purchase of the platform or changes in its moderation policies, as it does not have an adequate comparison group. The results quantify the increase in hate messages, but this growth may be due to specific events, call-out effects, or changes in the composition of X users.  

In addition, the authors use the number of likes on hate posts as an indicator of engagement, but given that policies on who can view and like posts had changed during the period analyzed, the comparison is not entirely accurate. There are also limitations in the methodology used to detect hate content: the study uses a dictionary-based method, which, while useful for analyzing large volumes of data, has significant problems. On the one hand, this approach relies on predefined lists of words considered offensive, which can generate false positives if out-of-context terms are identified (e.g., a word that is offensive in one context but not in another). On the other hand, there may be false negatives, since language is flexible and changes over time; hatred may be expressed subtly or through euphemisms that are not in the list of words used for classification. Still, the study is relevant because it shows a dramatic increase in the number of messages with hateful content on the platform.