[Paper Review] Did the Musk Takeover Boost Contentious Actors on Twitter?

Christopher Barrie|arXiv (Cornell University)|Dec 20, 2022

Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection6 citations

TL;DR

This study investigates whether Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 boosted engagement for contentious political actors, particularly those on the political right. Using a public list of 138,000 accounts that purchased blue check verification between November 9–11, 2022, and analyzing ~4.9 million tweets from politically contentious accounts, the authors find a 70% increase in retweets and a 14% increase in likes post-acquisition—driven by a surge in supportive users—yet no additional engagement boost from verification itself.

ABSTRACT

Twitter has been accused of a liberal bias in its account verification and content moderation policies. Elon Musk pledged, after his acquisition of the company, to promote free speech on the platform by overhauling verification and moderation policies. These events sparked fears of a rise in influence of contentious actors -- notably from the political right. In this article, I use a publicly released list of 138k Twitter accounts that purchased blue check verification during the open window of November 9-November 11, 2022. I retrieve 4.9m tweets from a sample of politically contentious accounts. I then compare engagement on contentious user posts before and after the Musk acquisition. I find that the period following the Musk acquisition saw a substantive increase in post engagement. There is no additional increase following blue tick verification. I explain the findings with reference to an increase in activity by a newly sympathetic user base.

Motivation & Objective

• To assess whether Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter led to increased engagement for contentious political actors, particularly those aligned with his free speech platform vision.
• To examine whether the newly launched paid blue check verification system provided an additional engagement boost to these accounts.
• To disentangle the effects of Musk’s acquisition from the timing of blue tick verification, which occurred during a brief open window in November 2022.
• To evaluate whether the observed engagement changes were due to user-driven shifts or algorithmic amplification.

Proposed method

• The study uses a publicly released dataset of 138,000 Twitter accounts that purchased blue check verification between November 9–11, 2022, compiled by software developers Travis Brown and Casey Ho.
• It retrieves approximately 4.9 million tweets from a sample of politically contentious accounts, including far-right and far-right-adjacent users.
• A fixed-effects regression model is applied with time dummies for three-day intervals post-acquisition, controlling for user-specific effects and clustering standard errors by user.
• The model estimates the impact of the Musk acquisition and blue tick verification on logged retweets and likes, using the equation: $ \text{Engagement}_{i,t} = \beta_1 \text{Post-Musk} + \beta_2 \text{Verification} + \gamma\textbf{X}_{i,t} + \alpha_i + \epsilon_{i,t} $.
• A comparison group of 1.2 million tweets from 933 non-contentious verified users is used to test whether the engagement increase is specific to contentious actors or a general platform-wide trend.
• The analysis includes three-day time dummy coefficients to track engagement trends over time, with a focus on the period surrounding the verification window.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Did Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter lead to a measurable increase in engagement for contentious political actors on the platform?
• RQ2 Did the conferral of blue check verification on these accounts result in an additional, incremental boost in post engagement?
• RQ3 Was the observed increase in engagement due to a surge in supportive users following Musk’s public signals on free speech, or due to algorithmic amplification?
• RQ4 How does the engagement boost for contentious users compare to that of general users who also obtained verification during the same period?

Key findings

• The Musk acquisition was associated with a 70% increase in retweets and a 14% increase in likes for contentious political accounts, as indicated by exponentiated coefficients from the regression model.
• The increase in engagement was sustained over time and most pronounced for retweets, suggesting a significant shift in user behavior rather than a temporary spike.
• There was no statistically significant additional boost in engagement following blue tick verification, indicating that verification alone did not amplify visibility or engagement.
• The comparison group of non-contentious verified users saw a smaller engagement increase—28% in retweets and 4% in likes—suggesting the effect was specific to contentious actors.
• The sustained engagement increase post-acquisition, even after the verification window closed, points to a broader user base shift driven by Musk’s public stance on free speech.
• The results are consistent across multiple model specifications and time-dummy analyses, reinforcing the conclusion that the acquisition signal, not verification, drove the engagement surge.