10 highlights of Musk’s first year as Twitter’s owner

It’s been a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranding it as X. What a year it has been.

We’ve kept a close eye on every reckless decision he’s made since he bought the platform, and selected ten of Musk’s brightest moments:

1. Mass layoffs: Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk lays off half of his staff and most of the teams responsible for content moderation and safety.
2. Selling blue ticks: To punish journalists, academics and experts, he starts selling blue ticks, for just $8 a month.
3. Impersonation accounts: Waves of impersonation accounts of prominent figures start causing real problems.
4. Hate speech rises: CCDH shows a worrying increase in the volume of hate speech on Twitter, yet Musk says it’s actually going down. 
5. Reinstating banned accounts: Musk tweets a poll asking Twitter users if Trump should be reinstated, and welcomes back several accounts that had previously violated Twitter’s Community Guidelines including Andrew Tate and Ye (Kanye West).
6. Continued hate & disinformation: CCDH shows these accounts are back at it and spreading hate and disinformation, again!
7. Trust and Safety Council disbandment: Members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council resign citing our work… Four days later Musk disbands the whole thing.
8. Rebranding to X: After Linda Yaccarino joins the sinking ship, Musk rebrands Twitter to X, scraps the feature for reporting misleading information, and ditches the election integrity team.
9. Targeting journalists: Musk, who had already shown a disdain for journalism by banning critical journalists, updates the platform to hide article headlines from links.
10. Lawsuit against CCDH: Amid this turmoil, Musk sues us because our research shows he’s failing to stop X from becoming a cesspit of hate and lies.

Watch our video to learn more.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man is suing CCDH because our research has unveiled the extent of hate, disinformation, and harm allowed to flourish on his platform.

But it’s Elon Musk’s own decisions that broke Twitter and turned it into a hellscape.

The Israel-Hamas conflict shows how X has become a breeding ground for disinformation and hate. Musk himself recommended antisemitic accounts to X users when the news of the conflict broke.

Online hate and disinformation cause real damage to human rights and civil liberties. What Musk has done to Twitter shows why we urgently need social media safety, transparency, accountability and responsibility, so we can take platforms and their bosses to task when their desire for profit hurts real people and polarizes, fractures and damages our society.