Shortly after Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in April 2022, the billionaire entrepreneur tweeted that for the social media platform “to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally”.
Until that point, the right had repeatedly claimed that Twitter was a progressive mouthpiece, overrun with West Coast liberals who censored views or news they disliked.
Two years on, that notion has been turned on its head. Twitter is now X and is facing accusations that it has become a vehicle for the political views of its owner, who has veered sharply to the right and frequently grandstands on domestic and international affairs.
Over the past few weeks, Musk has enraged police and politicians in the UK by characterising far-right riots in Britain as a “civil war”, making incendiary attacks on British prime minister Keir Starmer for clamping down on them, and sharing falsehoods originally posted by the white supremacist group Britain First.
In Europe, the European Union (EU) services commissioner Thierry Breton threatened on Monday the “full use” of sanctions under EU law if Musk fails to curb “illegal content”.
In the US, Musk has thrown his full weight behind Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, hosting a gushing, two-hour interview with the Republican candidate this week and pitching himself as an adviser in a potential Trump White House.
“No one’s themselves in an adversarial interview,” Musk said, setting the tone at the start of the conversation with Trump, just hours after posting a meme directed at Breton urging him to “f**k your own face”.
To his enthusiastic supporters, Musk is a truthteller willing to defend freedom of speech no matter how unpopular. To his critics, Musk’s commentary has exposed as never before the risks of having a political agitator at the helm of one of the world’s top social media platforms and sources of news.
“What’s ironic is that the worst fears of conservatives for years — that the owner would act in a politically biased way — have now happened, but they’ve happened in favour of the right wing,” says Eli Pariser, codirector of New_ Public, a non-profit organisation focused on building safe digital public spaces. “This is why a `global town square’ should not be owned by a Silicon Valley company.”
Musk’s recent provocations also underscore his journey from celebrated innovator to divisive ideologue. For all his achievements in the fields of renewable energy, transportation and space, he is now seen just as much as a troll as a trailblazer.
[ Trump ditches Truth Social investors for Elon Musk and XOpens in new window ]
But for all the noise, can Musk actually sway elections and present a threat to international stability? Or is he merely piggybacking on to events for clicks and showmanship? Musk, says investor and activist Roger McNamee, “may be an angry man screaming into a hurricane”.
As the owner of X, Musk says he is protecting a vision of absolute free speech and eradicating biases that were pervasive under previous liberal management.
Since acquiring the platform for $44 billion (€40 billion) he has loosened its moderation policies, allowing previously suspended accounts to return, including that of Trump as well as far-right and white supremacist figures Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson. He has also implemented volunteer moderation features such as “community notes” to help with fact-checking, rather than take down inaccurate or offensive posts.
Musk's Twitter takeover troubles Irish regulators
This year, Musk has increasingly inserted himself into political events at home and abroad. Shortly after the assassination attempt on Trump, Musk publicly endorsed the former president for the first time, and has since said he has contributed to a pro-Trump super Pac.
For years, Republicans complained that social media platforms more broadly were biased against conservative voices. Now, Democrats are the ones complaining.
Jerry Nadler, a congressman from New York, recently called for an inquiry into reports of X users being blocked from following Kamala Harris after she became the party’s presidential candidate. Last week, a popular X account in support of Harris called “White Dudes for Harris” complained that it had been labelled as spam after being falsely accused of manipulating the platform. Another group, Progressives for Harris, was also temporarily suspended earlier this month.
Experts warn that it is hard to decipher what are technical glitches or errors in moderation enforcement versus deliberate attempts to suppress speech, particularly in the wake of Musk firing many of the company’s communications and policy workers.
“One of the first things that Musk did was remove and lay off whatever infrastructure existed for some transparency into how Twitter was making decisions and what its community guidelines were and how it is being enforced,” says New_ Public’s Pariser.
[ Musk’s lack of interest in truth shows why Government must act on media ownershipOpens in new window ]
“This has allowed him not only to make more spur of the moment impulsive decisions, but to do [so] with total opacity. When you have a lot of power and no transparency, people have the right to wonder.”
Regardless of whether Musk tinkers with the platform under the hood to further a political agenda or not, there is still the question of the impact of his own X posts, as the most popular account on the platform with nearly 195 million followers.
Musk has previously ordered engineers to manipulate X’s algorithm to juice impressions of his own posts, per media reports (which he tacitly acknowledged in a post). In a sign of his clout, analysis by the Financial Times found that Musk’s recent interactions with far-right accounts and hashtags had significantly boosted their reach, including among users who would not normally be served this type of content.
In the US, in advance of the November vote, some experts warn that Musk’s tendency to share what they deem to be baseless election misinformation or conspiracy theories in particular could be harmful to the democratic process.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate last week found that election claims from Musk that it deemed to be “misleading” — including allegations of Democrats “importing voters” and an AI “deepfake” clip of Harris — had been viewed 1.2 billion times on X, with no fact checks or “community notes” appended.
This month, five secretaries of US states wrote an open letter to Musk complaining of election-related misinformation appearing in Grok, the AI chatbot on X.
Musk is unlikely to cause a voter to switch parties in the US, says Katie Harbath, global affairs officer at Duco Experts and previously chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. But she argues he could have an impact on “voter turnout” if he amplifies misinformation about violence at the polls, for example.
“What I’m most worried about is Elon turning up the rhetoric and heat in a way that could lead to offline violence,” adds Harbath, also a former Meta public policy director.
Quantifying the extent to which online speech can spill over into the real world can be tricky. But already in some countries, Musk’s wading into debates appears to have energised certain local groups.
In Brazil for example, the entrepreneur has been adopted as a talismanic figure by conservatives for pushing back against requests to take down certain popular far-right accounts, calling on a supreme court justice to “resign or be impeached”.
Leonardo Meira Reis, analyst at Eurasia Group in Brasília, warns Musk’s statements on X “have practical repercussions in a deeply divided country like Brazil”, adding: “Musk is not responsible for the political polarisation in Brazil, but his actions make it more evident.”
Meanwhile, researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University have found that extremist groups have viewed Musk’s takeover as an opportunity to rejoin the platform en masse. In one report, the Institute found X hashtags in Ireland being used to mobilise anti-immigration demonstrations, just months before public unrest and rioting erupted in the capital.
In the UK, police and analysts say the recent riots were fuelled by X as well as other social platforms, with Musk perceived as fanning the flames. Many fear there is more to come.
“The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own,” wrote Bruce Daisley, former head of Twitter’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in an oped.
“We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6th January, 2021.”
Nevertheless, some experts argue that there are limits to Musk’s influence. Under its new owner, X’s cultural significance has been declining and the platform remains far smaller in scale than dominant rival Meta. X’s global user numbers are 359 million, according to data from Emarketer, compared with more than 2 billion at Meta’s Facebook.
Others note that many liberals say they are decamping to alternatives such as Meta’s clone Threads, leaving Musk preaching to the converted.
“Luckily, X is still not where most people get their news,” says Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University. “So he can drive a conversation but that doesn’t mean he has the last word.”
Attempts to curb Musk and X have been scattergun. In the EU, leaders are invoking the Digital Services Act, which places responsibilities on social media platforms to police hate speech and disinformation. Under the new rules, if a platform refuses to stop activity that could “cause serious harm”, the EU commission could instruct telecom providers in the member state where the company is based to switch off access to the site.
In the US, there are fewer mechanisms to prevent Musk from using the platform he owns to promote a political agenda or spread misinformation.
[ The Irish Times view on Elon Musk and the regulators: more conflict aheadOpens in new window ]
Traditional news organisations have long had clear rules about how to maintain editorial independence but tech platforms do not fall within that scope, and are protected not only by the First Amendment but also by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which shields them from liability for the content they host.
Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia University journalism school, argues that Musk’s freedom to play the role of strident media baron is a result of Silicon Valley’s long-running aversion to internet regulation creating a regulatory vacuum.
“With Elon Musk, you have the consequence of a world that has been carefully created by a legal argument that says that [social media platforms] are capable of self-regulation,” Bell says.
“Elon has come along with a lot of money and he’s leaned on a rotten door and it’s given way. It is a deliberate systemic failure and the platforms are all complicit in that.” - This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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