In a December 9, 2022 first-person opinion essay for MIT Technology Review, California state senator Scott Wiener argued that Twitter under Elon Musk had become more hostile to LGBTQ+ users and less dependable at responding to harassment and threats. His case drew on his own experience of being targeted online and his assessment of the platform’s response—not on a platform-wide study proving Musk caused particular acts of abuse.
What Scott Wiener said happened to him
Wiener’s essay connected his experience to Musk’s restoration of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account. In the indexed excerpt of the essay, Wiener says Greene called him a “communist groomer.” He describes attacks aimed at his identity and political role, and says he had previously faced online abuse using anti-gay and anti-trans language.
Wiener also placed the escalation in the aftermath of the November 19, 2022 Club Q shooting. These are details from his account in the essay; they should be understood as his testimony, not as independently established findings about the causes of individual attacks. The essay also discusses Musk-era account reinstatements and a proposed poll-based approach to reinstating suspended accounts. Reinstatement is relevant context, but by itself does not establish that it caused a specific threat or harm.
What contemporaneous measurements found
Two reports from late 2022 offered evidence of increases in particular slur-containing posts. Their samples and time periods differ, so their figures should not be combined or treated as a measure of all hateful content, what users saw, or the harm they experienced.
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| Report | What it measured | Reported result | What the figure does not establish |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLAAD and Media Matters analysis, 2022, as reported by TechCrunch on December 13, 2022 | Use of the anti-LGBTQ slur “groomer” in tweets and retweets by nine popular right-wing accounts | Instances rose 1,200%, from 3,600 to 48,000 | It was a selected-account sample focused on one slur, not a count of all anti-LGBTQ content on Twitter. |
| Center for Countering Digital Hate research, 2022, as reported by The Guardian on December 3, relaying Reuters | Tweets containing a gay slur during the studied week, compared with the month before Musk took over | They were up 31% | The result concerns one term and a specific comparison period; it is not a direct measure of exposure, user safety, or all anti-LGBTQ content. |
The Guardian’s report also described a separate finding: tweets containing an anti-Black slur during the studied week were three times the number seen in the month before Musk took over. That is a different category and comparison, not an LGBTQ-specific measure.
How Twitter’s safety team described its approach
In the same contemporaneous reporting, Twitter Trust and Safety head Ella Irwin said Musk encouraged the team to use automation more and to move quickly on safety enforcement. That account provides a platform-side explanation of the team’s stated approach at the time. It does not, on its own, show whether people became safer or resolve Wiener’s criticism of the platform’s response.
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Advocacy criticism is not the same as a causal estimate
TechCrunch quoted Derrick Johnson, then identified as NAACP president, saying: “What is deeply troubling to us is the increase in hate speech, racial slurs, antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ violence on Twitter, a direct result of Elon Musk’s leadership.” This is Johnson’s and the NAACP’s stated judgment about causation, not an independently established causal estimate.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the essay can—and cannot—show
Wiener’s first-person account gives the title’s “I would know” its meaning: he was describing a platform experience he had personally faced as an openly targeted public official. The contemporaneous studies add evidence that specific slur-containing content increased in particular samples after Musk took over. Neither kind of evidence, alone or together, proves a platform-wide causal account of every threat, establishes how much hateful material individual users encountered, or answers whether X is safer today. These sources describe conditions and disputes in 2022, not current conditions.
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