"Less than a week after Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, the tech billionaire became embroiled in a series of scandals on his own platform. They included a spike in the use of hate speech on the website and Musk himself posting a baseless anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

The scandals have prompted dire warnings from disinformation experts and environmental advocates, who say the popular social media platform plays an outsized role in the spread of falsehoods that are muddying healthy public debate and sowing division ahead of the consequential U.S. midterm elections and COP27 global climate talks.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” sought to quell fears that false and misleading information would spread more freely on Twitter under his leadership, promising to advertisers in an Oct. 27 tweet that the platform would not become a “free-for-all hellscape.”"

Kristoffer Tigue reports for Inside Climate News November 4, 2022. [2]