Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Isabelle Custer, and I am a sophomore Criminology student from Charleston, South Carolina. I am particularly interested in research within the criminal justice and forensic science fields, and I aspire to become a detective in the future.

Where Are They Now? A Content Analysis on the Twitter Accounts Reinstated by Elon Musk

Abstract

This research project examined the aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover of popular social media platform “X”, formerly known as Twitter. Following his acquisition of the app, hate speech and conspiracy theories began to circulate incessantly through Twitter through means of reinstated accounts that were previously banned. In March 2023, over 5,000 of these previously banned Twitter accounts were randomly sampled and we gathered their most recent 100,000 tweets. Next, we utilized a combination of content analysis and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to pinpoint common topics/themes and investigate them for content containing hate speech and conspiracy theories. The reinstated accounts displayed nodes of both sexual and racial discrimination while pushing a far-right extremist viewpoint; moreover, several accounts spread conspiracies regarding significant current events, such as the COVID-19 vaccination, Big Pharma, and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Notably, most of the sampled tweets came from bots, or automated social algorithms intended to communicate on social media. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter aimed to reduce the app’s prior censoring of users which limited their free speech. After obtaining ownership of X, record high numbers of conspiracists and bigots were recorded among the app, spreading extensive misinformation and hate speech.

Keywords: social media, qualitative data, communications, sociology, content analysis