A week after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president, President Joe Biden's team used Musk's social media platform X — in addition to more neutral spaces such as Facebook and Instagram — to announce he is ending his reelection campaign.
It's a testament to how ingrained the platform has become among the power players of the political and media world, as well as users looking for news and live updates of major events. While Meta's Facebook and Instagram, along with TikTok, boast far more users, X users say keeping up with the news is not the reason they use those platforms, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. X is the exception: most of the site's users say following the news is a reason they use it and about half say they regularly get their news from there.
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“X is where history happens,” posted X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Sunday with a screenshot of Biden's announcement. While a comment pointed out that the same message was posted on other social media platforms as well, the narrative remains an important one for X and its long-touted efforts to become a “digital town square.”
“Other platforms have emerged with the goal of supplanting X, but what events like the Biden post shows is that this is still where people go to make both fast and consequential impact,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.
That's even though the site has become a less reliable place to find accurate information, due in large part to changes Musk made since assuming the helm. Since the 2022 takeover, Musk has upended many of the former Twitter’s policies including around misinformation and hate speech, gutted its staff and transformed what people see on the site.
“It does not appear as though would-be competitors have been able to displace Twitter from its perch as the go-to place for political news,” Kreps said. “In an ideal world, a lot of people would have and did try to go elsewhere but these alternatives needed to offer products that people want and use and they have not done that. Until that time, we’ll probably see a segment of users for whom their principles and practices are at odds.”
As its owner and arguably most influential user, Musk has also used X to try to sway political discourse around the world — getting in a dustup with a Brazilian judge over censorship, railing against what he calls the “woke mind virus” and amplifying false claims that Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to vote in U.S. elections.
Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk turned increasingly toward the right in his posts and actions on the platform. He's reinstated previously banned accounts such as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as accounts belonging to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Advertisers who halted spending on X in response to antisemitic and other hateful material were engaging in “blackmail,” Musk has alleged. And it was on X that he announced he was moving the company's headquarters, as well as those of SpaceX, to the red state of Texas from deep blue California.
“The important thing about Twitter has long been the community of users who've embraced it. And there is a proliferation of journalists and elected officials and thought 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 is an effective way of rapidly getting a message out to a large and influential group of people. However, that group is clearly waning. You are seeing users of the platform jumping ship, left and right. And as you are seeing the content become more and more extreme and unsuitable for general consumption.”
Biden's message Sunday was posted on X two minutes before it went up on Meta platforms such as Facebook and Threads. It's not clear if this was intentional, and the campaign did not immediately respond to a message for comment on Monday.
“It might have been just, you know, who hit enter first on the keyboard internally,” Jablonowski said. “But I think you definitely are seeing a world where five years ago, this might have been exclusively on Twitter, and now you’re seeing it across many different properties.”
Political campaigns, he noted, need to meet voters where the voters are — and for many, that is still X.
“Democrats still do appearances on Fox News,” he said.
When it comes to advertising dollars, however, “the money is clearly going to Meta properties and YouTube. I don’t know, at least on the Democratic side, many, if any campaigns that are looking to spend advertising dollars on (X)."