2 weeks Ago
In the days before the US presidential election, Elon Musk’s centrality to his social media platform, X, became more pronounced. Musk has posted more than 3,000 times on the site in the past month, according to a tally by The New York Times , campaigning heavily for former President Donald Trump. The tech mogul has also shared dozens of unfounded claims about the election, including that votes will be rigged against his preferred candidate.
All of his posts have traveled further and resounded more widely than ever as Musk’s X account has come to dominate the platform, effectively making him the host of his own social media site. His account is the most popular on X by a significant margin, with more than 202 million followers. It drives the platform’s daily conversation and nudges discussion to the right, according to independent research and an analysis by the Times.
And engagement with his posts – including likes and reposts – has doubled over the past year, according to X’s metrics. The repercussions of Musk’s preeminence on X – especially as he casts doubt on the integrity of the election – could be profound. “It’s so consequential that someone who is such a partisan figure is inhabiting that piece of digital real estate,” said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a group that studies online disinformation.
Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment. Last month, he posted that X products were the “best thing on the Internet for truth.” Here’s how his account has taken center stage at X.
The most-followed by far Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for US$44bil in 2022, vowing to make it a public town square. He swiftly became the most powerful super-user on the site. Musk overtook former President Barack Obama in March 2023 to become the most-followed person on the platform, with 133 million followers.
Since then, his count has risen 52%. Obama’s following, in contrast, has decreased slightly, by about 2 million, to just over 131 million followers. (Bot accounts exist on X and may be a factor in some of the tallies.
) Alongside Musk’s ballooning follower count, engagement with his posts has mushroomed. During a two-week period in October, Musk’s 1,220 posts generated nearly 65,000 engagements on average, according to the Times analysis of Musk’s posts over the past year that tallied likes and reposts. In a similar stretch a year ago, his posts averaged around 30,000 engagements.
That attention and interaction are unique to Musk, according to the Times analysis. Twenty-seven posts to Obama’s account – still the second-most popular – received 573,000 reposts during a two-week period in early October. The 1,200 posts from Musk’s account were reposted nearly 11 million times.
Much of Musk’s influence on X stems from the rate at which he posts, which has skyrocketed in recent months. In June, he posted 504 times, according to data gathered from his account by Bright Data, an online data collection service. By September, he was posting more than 1,000 times a month.
Amplifying disinformation So what has Musk used his account’s dominance on X to do? In recent weeks, he has posted almost exclusively about politics. Some of that includes misleading information about the election, according to a study by the nonpartisan fact-checking service PolitiFact. Musk, 53, has claimed that a vast fraud is underway to steal the election from Trump and that Democrats are shuttling immigrants into the country to vote illegally, among other false narratives.
Posts from Musk in the first two weeks of October that amplified conspiracy theories about the election, the government’s response to hurricanes Helene and Milton and voter identification laws were viewed nearly 679 million times, were liked more than 5.3 million times and were reposted more than 1.6 million times, according to PolitiFact.
“If Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk posted Sept 29. The post was viewed more than 103 million times and reposted nearly 180,000 times. “He’s using his platform to spread these ridiculous and harmful conspiracy theories,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and author of a book about QAnon, a pro-Trump movement that claims the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
“He has enabled this vast and very lucrative web of disinformation superspreaders while also being one himself.” A recommended account Can X users escape Musk? Anecdotally at least, the answer is no. When new users set up accounts on X, the platform recommends whom to follow.
Musk is one of the first suggested accounts, the Times found by registering a half dozen accounts last month. X also suggests users follow topics related to his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX. Musk previously took steps at X to ensure that his account is front and center.
After a post by President Joe Biden about the 2023 Super Bowl received more engagement than Musk’s, the billionaire demanded that X’s teams find a way to improve his figures, three people with knowledge of the matter said. A month later, the company published the code that drives its recommendation algorithm in a transparency effort. The code contained a snippet that marked Musk’s posts as a priority.
The public code has not been updated since. “There are fewer and fewer ‘main characters’ who are not Musk, and virtually anyone who breaks through is going to be subsumed into Musk’s orbit,” Brooking said. In Pennsylvania, a swing state where Musk has made a huge effort to campaign for Trump, the Times interviewed more than a dozen X users last month and found that eight were seeing Musk’s posts in their “For You” timeline – even though only one of them followed him.
Some of the posts by Musk seen by Pennsylvania X users included a pro-Trump meme, a recent SpaceX rocket launch and an accusation that Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, created an “incitement to violence.” The overwhelming presence of Musk on X has frustrated some users. “He’s definitely a really smart guy, but if I don’t follow him, he shouldn’t be popping up on my page,” said Jakob Fallat, 19, a student at Montgomery County Community College who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs.
He typically uses X about four times a week to follow sports, he said. Jack Dugan, 20, a student at Gwynedd Mercy University in Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania, said he used X primarily to follow his friends and get news about sports and politics. He does not follow Musk but still sees his posts.
“It’s pretty much all he posts now: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’,” Dugan said, adding that he was undecided on whom he would vote for. “I’m not really huge on it.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company.
