Hate speech is still on Twitter because the company wants it there, not because it's too hard to stop.
April 16, 2026
Original Paper
The Enforcement and Feasibility of Hate Speech Moderation on Twitter
arXiv · 2604.12289
The Takeaway
The common excuse for why social media is toxic is that the sheer volume of posts makes moderation impossible. This paper runs the numbers and finds that 80% of hateful content stays online regardless of how bad it is—and that fixing this is actually economically and technically feasible. The failure to clean up the platform is an institutional choice to prioritize engagement over safety, not a 'limit of technology.' This overturns the industry narrative that moderation is an unsolvable 'hard problem.' For users, it means that the toxicity of your feed isn't a bug in the AI; it’s a feature of the business model.
From the abstract
Online hate speech is associated with substantial social harms, yet it remains unclear how consistently platforms enforce hate speech policies or whether enforcement is feasible at scale. We address these questions through a global audit of hate speech moderation on Twitter (now X). Using a complete 24-hour snapshot of public tweets, we construct representative samples comprising 540,000 tweets annotated for hate speech by trained annotators across eight major languages. Five months after postin