A week after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president, President Joe Biden’s team took to Musk’s social media platform X — in addition to more neutral spaces such as Facebook and Instagram — to announce that he is ending his re-election campaign.
This speaks to the platform’s deep roots among political and media influencers, as well as users looking for news and live updates on major events. While Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, have far more users, X users say that keeping up with the news is not why they use these platforms, according to a recent study Pew Research Center survey. X is the exception: most users of the site say that following the news is a reason why they use it and about half say they regularly get their information from this site.
“X is where the story happens,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said Sunday, along with a screenshot of Biden’s announcement. While one commenter pointed out that the same message was also posted on other social media platforms, the narrative remains important to X and its vaunted company. efforts to become a “digital city square”.
“Other platforms have emerged to displace X, but what events like Biden show is that this is still where people are turning to make a quick and big impact,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.
And that’s even though the site has become a less reliable place to find accurate information, largely because of changes Musk has made since taking the helm. takeover, Musk overturned many of Twitter’s old policies, including those regarding misinformation and hate speech, emptied its staff and transformed what people see on the site.
“It doesn’t appear that potential competitors have been able to dethrone Twitter as the go-to source for political news,” Kreps said. “In an ideal world, many people would have tried to go elsewhere, but those alternatives had to offer products that people want and use, which they didn’t. By then, we’re likely to see a segment of users for whom the principles and practices are at odds.”
As its owner and arguably most influential user, Musk has also used X to attempt to influence political discourse around the world, putting himself in a very different position. clash with a Brazilian judge on censorship, denouncing what he calls the “virus of the awakened mind” and amplify false statements that Democrats are secretly bringing in migrants to vote in US elections.
Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk increasingly shifted to the right in his posts and actions on the platform. He reinstated previously banned accounts, such as those of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as accounts belonging to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Advertisers who stopped spending on X in response to anti-Semitic and other hateful content were engage in “blackmail”, Musk alleged. And it was on X that he announced that he was moving the company’s headquarters, as well as those of SpaceXfrom the red state of Texas to deep blue California.
“The great thing about Twitter has long been the community of users who have embraced it. And there’s a proliferation of journalists, elected officials and thought leaders who still use it today,” said Mark Jablonowski, chief technology officer at DSPolitical, a digital advertising agency that works for Democratic campaigns. “And it’s an effective way to get a message out to a large and influential group of people quickly. But that group is clearly in decline. You’re seeing users jumping ship left and right. And you’re seeing content become more extreme and unsuitable for general consumption.”
Biden’s message Sunday was posted on X two minutes before it was posted on Meta platforms like Facebook and Threads. It’s unclear whether that was intentional, and the campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.
“It might just be the person who hit the Enter key first on the keyboard internally,” Jablonowski said. “But I think we’re seeing a world where five years ago this might have happened exclusively on Twitter, and now you’re seeing it on many different platforms.”
Political campaigns, he stressed, must meet voters where they are – and for many, that is still X.
“The Democrats are still making appearances on Fox “News,” he said.
When it comes to ad revenue, however, “the money is clearly going to the Meta properties and Youtube. I don’t know of many, if any, campaigns, at least on the Democratic side, that are looking to spend advertising money on (X).
