A week after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, President Joe Biden’s team used Musk’s social media platform X — alongside more neutral spaces such as Facebook and Instagram – to announce that he End of his re-election campaign.
This is a testament to how much the platform has established itself among the powerful in the political and media world, as well as users looking for news and live updates on important events. While Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, have far more users, X users say that staying up to date is not the reason they use these platforms, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. X is the exception: Most of the site’s users say that following the news is a reason for using it, and about half say they get their news from there regularly.
“X is where history happens,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted on Sunday with a screenshot of Biden’s announcement. While one comment pointed out that the same message was posted on other social media platforms, the narrative remains the same for X and its long-touted Efforts to become a “digital town square”.
“Other platforms have emerged that want to replace X, but events like the Biden post show that people are still going here to make a quick and lasting impact,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
This is despite the fact that the website has become a less reliable place to find accurate information, largely due to changes Musk has made since taking office. Since 2022 Takeover has turned Musk upside down many of Twitter’s former policies, including on misinformation and hate speech, has reduced its staff and changed what people see on the site.
“It doesn’t look like potential competitors have been able to dislodge Twitter from its perch as the go-to place for political news,” Kreps said. “In an ideal world, many people would have tried to go elsewhere, and they have, but those alternatives would have had to offer products that people want and use, and they haven’t. Until then, we’ll likely see a portion of users for whom their principles and practices are at odds.”
As the owner and arguably most influential user, Musk has also used X to influence political discourse around the world – and thus become a Dispute with a Brazilian judge about censorship, rails against what he calls the “woke mind virus,” and Amplification of false claims that the Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to bring them to the US elections.
Long before Musk endorsed Trump, his posts and actions on the platform were increasingly moving to the right. He has restored previously suspended accounts such as those of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former US 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 to engage in “blackmail”, Musk has claimed. And on X he announced that he will be moving the company headquarters and the SpaceXfrom deep blue California to the red state of Texas.
“The important thing about Twitter for a long time has been the community of users who have embraced it. And there are more and more journalists, elected officials and opinion leaders who still use it today,” said Mark Jablonowski, chief technology officer at DSPolitical, a digital advertising firm that works for Democratic campaigns. “And it’s an effective way to get a message out quickly to a large and influential group of people. But that group is clearly shrinking. You’re seeing users of the platform abandon ship left and right. And you’re seeing the content becoming more and more extreme and unsuitable for general consumption.”
Biden’s message on Sunday was posted on X two minutes before it was published on meta-platforms like Facebook and Threads. It’s not clear if that was intentional, and the campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Monday.
“Maybe it was just a matter of who internally hit the enter key on the keyboard first,” Jablonowski said. “But I think we’re definitely seeing a world where maybe five years ago this was happening exclusively on Twitter, and now we’re seeing it on many different platforms.”
Political campaigns must reach voters where they are, he noted – and for many, that is still X.
“Democrats are still appearing Fox News,” he said.
However, when it comes to advertising dollars, “the money is clearly going into meta properties and Youtube. I don’t know of many, if any, campaigns, at least on the Democratic side, that are willing to spend advertising money on (X).”