Elon Musk has turned X into a pro-Trump machine

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Elon Musk has turned X into a pro-Trump machine

Nearly two years after Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, the billionaire is leveraging its power as a source of real-time news for millions of users to try to sway the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in favour of former President Donald Trump.

Musk has already asserted his voice in the political sphere for months. He’s pushed racist conspiracy theories about the Biden administration’s immigration policies, obsessed over the “woke mind virus,” a term used by some conservatives to describe progressive causes, and warned of the country’s impending “doom” if a “red wave” does not materialize in November.

But now Musk, who is not only the owner but also the most followed user on X, has shifted to more direct campaigning for former President Donald Trump. It’s an unusual move for one of the world’s richest men and the leader of a mainstream social network.

Social media platforms have played a role in past elections: campaigns have used them to build support, foreign actors have used them in efforts to interfere in election outcomes and the industry was criticized in 2020 for restricting access to reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop. And some tech leaders have spoken out about their preferred candidate for the White House. 

But the major platforms themselves, and especially their owners, typically do not try to affect how users will vote, save for ensuring people have basic, accurate information about voting and removing influence operations that seek to covertly manipulate people.

Musk, by contrast, has turned the platform he purchased for $44 billion into his own personal, political messaging machine, seeking to influence his more than 190 million followers and, in some cases, sharing false claims from the very top.

Musk announced his official endorsement for Trump in a post last month that received 2.3 million likes. And on Monday, he hosted Trump for a friendly, 2-plus-hour livestreamed conversation on X, in which he allowed the former president to make at least 20 false claims about everything from crime and immigration to tax cuts, without pushback.

Trump used the conversation to fundraise, with his campaign team posting on X ahead of the event that “we’re asking YOU to make this President Trump’s BIGGEST FUNDRAISING DAY EVER!” X used the opportunity to send a notification – which featured Trump’s profile photo – to users encouraging them to buy a subscription to the platform.

Beyond his own posts, many of Musk’s changes as the owner of X have contributed to a broader, rightward shift in the platform’s culture, including his reinstatement of White supremacists and conspiracy theorists. He also moved to make it easier for politicians and political candidates to qualify for newsworthiness exemptions from the platform’s rules, when they would otherwise have had their content restricted or removed.

What’s more, X also twice labelled as spam and locked the account for “White Dudes for Harris,” a group that had been fundraising and rallying support for the vice president’s campaign — raising questions about the platform’s commitment to Musk’s stated goal of “free speech” and whether it was cracking down on viewpoints that differed from Musk’s.

And Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, which users access via X, was blasted last week by a group of secretaries of state for providing “false information” about Harris’ supposed ineligibility to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot in several battleground states. In a letter, the secretaries urged Musk to “immediately implement changes” on the X platform.

“I’m old enough to remember when we, at Twitter, took the industry-leading step to stop taking political ads. (Because) freedom of speech didn’t entitle you to freedom of reach actually wasn’t just a catchy slogan, we meant it,”

Lara Cohen, the platform’s former vice president of marketing who left the company after Musk’s takeover, said in a Threads post on Monday ahead of the Trump event. “Cut to tonight’s infomercials for the Trump campaign. It’s pathetic to see the platform and it’s (sic) owner sink lower and lower and lower every single day.”

For Musk, the potential privilege of whispering in Trump’s ear, should he win re-election, could give the billionaire even more power on the global stage. And it could benefit his business empire, which is largely reliant on government contracts and favourable policies. CNN