Threats Against Candidates Rose Fivefold on X Before Midterms

By James Calloway

Violent threats aimed at candidates jumped fivefold on Elon Musk's X in the run-up to the midterms, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. A separate CCDH analysis found that violent and hateful posts targeting U.S. politicians on Facebook quadrupled after Meta cut its fact-checking program in January 2025.

The day after Democrats swept the midterms, right-wing Facebook posts turned to calls for armed conflict with Muslims and socialists. One caption on an image of a rooftop sniper read "Vote from the rooftops" — a euphemism in right-wing subculture meaning that if voting fails, it's time to take up arms. Another post warned of a civil war with "no one left to protect Muslims and social democrats" if they defund the police.

A third post targeted Michigan senator-elect Abdul El Sayid directly: "I got a feeling that Abdul El Sayid won't be around too long." El Sayid faced one of the ugliest Islamophobic campaigns of the cycle.

What did the research measure?

The CCDH, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., analyzed replies to posts from ten candidates in battleground races from Michigan to Texas and found hundreds calling for violence. A similar June analysis traced the Facebook quadrupling to Meta's January 2025 fact-checking cut. Hate and violent speech targeting President Trump also doubled during that period.

"These findings point to a continued pattern of platforms' safeguards failing to proactively remove content that contributes to our increasingly violent political culture," CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed said.

A Meta spokesperson said the company regularly issues "public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025." The spokesperson said Meta removed content it found to violate its policies.

How did moderation get looser?

The rollback has a long arc. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg began as a free-speech absolutist, then beefed up moderation and third-party fact-checking after anti-minority hate speech on Facebook fueled real-world violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia a decade ago. The pandemic intensified the censorship debate, culminating in Donald Trump's removal after January 6, 2021.

Musk's 2022 takeover of Twitter changed the landscape further: he fired the moderation and fact-checking teams and replaced them with the crowdsourced Community Notes program. When Trump returned as president in 2024, Zuckerberg attributed pandemic-era speech policing to government pressure in public hearings and expressed regret. In 2025, he said Meta would remove content filters around immigration and gender across Instagram, Facebook and Threads.

"The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down," Zuckerberg said in a video message. He called Trump's 2024 victory a "cultural tipping point" and replaced fact-checking with Community Notes.

Meta has since moved its U.S. content moderation teams from California to Texas and now waits for user reports before taking content down. Zuckerberg has asked the Trump administration to push back against European and Latin American governments pressuring American platforms. YouTube, for its part, began encouraging moderators last year to leave up borderline videos, raising the threshold for offensive content from a quarter to half of a video.

What does the evidence say about the trade-off?

"Problematic content on Meta platforms, which is primarily Facebook and Instagram, has increased after Meta rolled back its kind of fact-checking and anti-hate speech policies," said Magdalena Wojcieszak, professor of communication at UC Davis. She pointed to an April study showing Instagram failed to remove 93% of flagged hateful and extremist content from white supremacist and Nazi accounts.

Her own research adds nuance. Meta's stricter moderation before the 2020 election cut misinformation exposure by 72% — but reducing exposure alone did not change political attitudes or diminish polarization.

Olivier Boutin, a UC Berkeley PhD student studying political misinformation, framed the dilemma: "Should we prefer to catch 95% of hateful speech at the cost of mistakenly flagging 1% of unobjectionable content, or is it better to live in a world in which 99% of hateful speech is caught but 5% of unobjectionable content is taken down? There's no right answer."

AI-powered slop has compounded the problem, worsening an information ecosystem already saturated with anti-immigration rhetoric, election denialism and health skepticism, experts said.

What happens after the midterms?

Wojcieszak said lasting change requires regulation and penalties for platforms spreading hate. "Without stricter and overt regulation, I do not think that the 'blue wave' will change anything by itself," she said. "Like I cannot imagine that suddenly Musk or other platform CEOs would say, 'Oh, you know, now the Democrats are my best buddies. Let me change back to stricter moderation policies.'"

Ahmed of CCDH called for consistency instead of swings between strict moderation and free-for-all speech. "We don't want this ridiculous pendulum swinging where [tech CEOs are] sucking up to whoever's in power," he said. "What the people want is transparency and accountability. So, if they [social media platforms] do contribute to causing real world harm, we should be able to hold them liable for it."

The political ground is already shifting: Palantir chief executive Alex Karp reasserted his "progressive" credentials this week after playing a key role in Trump's deportation campaign, and Meta's Washington operative Joel Kaplan — who helped Zuckerberg get close to Trump — will quit after 15 years. For marketers and platforms alike, the open question is whether the Democrats' win turns into actual tech regulation — or just another swing of the pendulum.