Is the combative entrepreneur fanning the flames of far-right politics or is he just ‘an angry man screaming into a hurricane’?
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”.
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. “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.”
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.
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. 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.
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 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.
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.
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