Elon Musk’s X Feed Becomes Megaphone for His Far-right Politics

The Washington Post / Faiz Siddiqui

13:37 JST, August 12, 2024

If you followed Elon Musk on Twitter in November 2021, you would have been bombarded with posts about Tesla and SpaceX, his two most valuable companies. A third of his tweets mentioned them – such as posts about Tesla’s Cybertruck, its “Full Self-Driving” software and his frustrations with the pandemic-related “supply chain nightmare.”

Nearly three years later, with Musk at the helm of the site he renamed X, the billionaire’s feed often reads more like a right-wing activist account, with alarmist posts about immigration and missives against “woke” ideology. He still posts frequently about Tesla, but the share of his posts about the company is less than half of what it was in November 2021. This year, political tweets made up 17 percent of his feed, an analysis by The Washington Post found – skyrocketing up from two percent in 2021.

Musk’s openly partisan participation on the site he bought in October 2022 reflects a broader evolution in his public persona from business-minded tech prodigy to right-wing firebrand. It has also raised questions about Musk’s intentions for the social networking site, which he said he purchased to promote free speech and a more open exchange of ideas. In some ways, the site has become a personal megaphone for his provocative political views.

X recently claimed that 35 million swing voters use the platform every month. With polls nationally and in crucial swing states showing a tightening race, where people get their information and the quality of that information could well decide the next president, as well as control of Congress.

Musk is the platform’s most followed user, with more than 193 million followers. X has at times boosted Musk’s tweets into users’ feeds, and algorithmically fed posts about causes he has promoted into users’ timelines. Neither he nor X responded to emailed requests for comment.

Musk has lately used his feed to promote the candidacy of former president Donald Trump, whom he formally endorsed with an X post. Trump has said he is participating in an interview with Musk on Monday, though few details have emerged.

To quantify the shift in Musk’s X feed, The Post analyzed tweets that contained at least seven words and were not reposts. The analysis classified the posts as related to politics, Tesla, Twitter (now X) or SpaceX based on keywords, but did not categorize as politics some of Musk’s posts that relate obliquely to the topic. The analysis found that his posts about Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX taken together dropped from 31 percent of his feed in 2021 to 21 percent this year. His posts about Twitter increased from 1 percent in 2021 before he purchased the company to 8 percent so far this year, while Tesla and SpaceX posts together dropped from 30 percent to 13 percent during that time.

The analysis also showed a sharp uptick in the frequency of Musk’s postings overall. He now posts five times as often as he did in 2021.

Despite a more than 30 percent drop in the number of people actively tweeting, according to figures reported last year, X remains one of the most influential platforms for disseminating information on the election. President Joe Biden took to the platform to announce he was leaving the presidential race, minutes before news organizations reported on his departure.

Some of the key topics of Musk’s political posts at the moment are his critiques of the flow of undocumented migrants to the United States, which he claims are shifting the makeup of the electorate; what he calls the “woke mind virus”; his opposition to transgender rights; the 2024 election, and the recent riots in Britain.

Earlier this month, Musk took to X to promote posts from other users that were increasingly typical for his feed: a story about a “controversial migrant flight program” green-lighted by the Biden administration, a right-wing furor about an Algerian boxer conservatives misidentified as transgender, a podcast featuring Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

“This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus,” Musk declared earlier this year.

Until Musk’s purchase, owners of large mainstream U.S. social media platforms typically refrained from publicly supporting candidates, despite accusations of left-wing bias from some conservatives who say content moderation disproportionately targeted their views. Those concerns came to a head in 2020 when multiple social media sites limited the spread of story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later said the company had made a mistake in doing so.

When Musk pursued the site in 2022, he was fuming about the suspension of conservative satire site the Babylon Bee and took umbrage with the ban on Trump. Days after taking control of the platform, Musk endorsed Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections – an extraordinary step for the head of a mainstream social media platform.

“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he said. He later restored Trump’s account.

After Musk’s takeover, Twitter shed around 80 percent of its workers, including much of the Trust and Safety department responsible for content moderation, and adjusted features – such as its trademark blue checks – that had been geared at establishing the authority of information on the site.

Many conservatives cheered Musk’s moves, which they said have allowed greater room for dissent and promoted more open conversations.

“He bought it to restore free speech. Our suspension was just one of many egregious examples of why that was necessary. Thank you, Elon!” wrote Seth Dillon, CEO of the conservative satire website Babylon Bee, months after Musk took over the site.

Musk has said he was driven into political discussion out of a sense of obligation.

“I would prefer to have zero involvement in politics,” he said earlier this month. “HOWEVER,” he added, “There is no ‘company success’ unless civilization itself continues to progress.”

“This insane shift by the ‘left’ away from a meritocracy and personal liberties … will be the end of civilization as we know it,” he said.

Musk’s handpicked chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, has also made her right-leaning positions public, replying to a post saying Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) should change parties, as “Pro-Israel candidates are welcome in the GOP,” with an enthusiastic, “Absolutely!”

Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment made through X.

Some democracy advocates have raised concerns about Musk’s behavior.

“It’s incumbent upon the owner of a platform like this to realize that the ultimate responsibility, in addition to running a sustainable business, is to protect the quality and accuracy of the information environment of the platform precisely so that it can have a brand that people can count on,” said Eddie Perez, board member at the nonpartisan OSET Institute, which aims to promote confidence in elections through trustworthy technology, and a former director for civic integrity at Twitter.

“That responsibility to foster an accurate and authoritative information environment necessarily means that you must therefore step back from using it as a personal mouthpiece – much less an inflammatory one,” he added.

For Musk’s critics, his vocal partisanship has called into question his site’s reliability a source of information for the 2024 election.

On Aug. 2, as Musk was tweeting in support of right-wing positions, political organizer William McConnell found his group’s handle @Progs4Harris suddenly suspended as it was gaining momentum on X – days after the same thing happened to “White Dudes for Harris” and users found themselves unable to follow @KamalaHQ, the official rapid response handle of Kamala Harris’s campaign.

“Given that it happened to similar groups in similar circumstances, it’s starting look suspect and that’s a problem,” said McConnell, 32, of Sergeantsville, N.J.

The incident fueled suspicions that the temporary throttling of pro-Harris accounts was not coincidental.

“It’s hard to know if this is just another example of how Elon Musk has functionally ruined Twitter or if it’s something more sinister,” Progressives for Harris said in a statement shortly before its account was restored and organizers were told it was flagged as spam by mistake.

Musk’s political rhetoric has alienated many – among them his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, a transgender woman. Wilson has become an outspoken voice against Musk, following his comments last month that the “woke mind virus” killed her.

Musk’s openly anti-trans positions have for years weighed on his product’s fans – and his onetime defenders.

Earl Banning, a Tesla shareholder who cashed out his 401(k) and placed it into Tesla stock in 2015, has become an ardent Musk critic on X. Banning, an Anchorage neuropsychologist and parent of a transgender 15-year-old, said Musk’s anti-trans postings were the last straw.

“For that reason alone I needed to speak up,” he said.

Late last month, a longtime Tesla fan took to X to lament Musk’s shift into overt and frequent political posting, urging him to “chill on posting about Politics.”

“Sure, it’s your right as an American,” the user wrote. “But as one of the world’s most powerful and influential people i think we need to hold a higher standard of discourse.”

“I hear you,” Musk replied.

Last week, Musk posted a steady stream of grievances, elevating posts about the far-right riots in Britain, the supposed erosion of Western cultures and calling Harris “literally a communist.” Nothing had changed.

Methodology:

The Post analyzed all of Elon Musk’s tweets that contained at least seven words and were not reposts from Jan. 1, 2021 through Aug. 9, 2024 – a total of 9,567 posts of the 23,558 posts Musk made during that time. All tweets, regardless of length, were included in calculating the volume of Musk’s posts per day. The Post obtained the tweets from the National Conference on Citizenship, web data collection company Bright Data and Polititweet.org. Tweets were classified as relating to Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter (now X) or politics based on keywords in the text. Some tweets could be about multiple topics. About 60 percent of tweets were outside those four topics. In 2021, 19 percent of Musk’s posts were about Tesla; in 2024 so far, 7 percent were.

Reporters excluded very short posts for the topic analysis because there’s too little content in Musk’s own words to ascertain a topic. Nearly 30 percent of Musk’s tweets are a single word, emoji or exclamation marks. Almost five percent consist of only the “tears of joy” or “rolling on the floor laughing” emoji.

Classifying free text into categories is tricky under optimal circumstances. It’s trickier here for two reasons: We needed to distinguish Musk’s newfound conservative politics from long-standing references to electric vehicle tax incentives (a frequent Tesla-related topic), and to exclude his frequent discussions of content moderation policies linked to his acquisition of Twitter, which has both political and corporate valence. Thus, neither “free speech” nor “incentive” keywords were included in The Post’s politics category. Criticism of the media was not included in the politics category either.

The Post selected keywords for each category in two steps: First, we selected obvious handpicked terms (like “self-driving” and “Tesla” for the Tesla category, or “Biden” and “woke mind virus” for the politics category). Next, we calculated which other terms occurred disproportionately in tweets matching the handpicked keywords (compared with those that didn’t match the handpicked keywords). Reporters added the terms that directly related to the categories – on the theory that if term A and term B frequently co-occur in posts about a given topic, term B likely relates to that same topic alone. This keyword expansion ensures that terms like “lithium” that relate to Tesla’s business but sometimes occur alone are used to flag Tesla-related tweets.

Finally, we examined a subset of posts matching each keyword set to estimate precision – ensuring that the vast majority of posts tagged as Tesla really are about Tesla. Our keywords don’t match every post relevant to the topics, especially when Musk uses technical terms or refers to short-lived political controversies.