Think of it as a Venn diagram. Elon Musk is arguably the richest person in the world and controls a vast social media platform. The President of the United States is likely the most powerful person in the world. Could who has the most money help determine who has the most power? And will we ever know?
You may have followed Musk’s public love affair with Donald Trump: Fresh off recovering from an assassination attempt, he took to his platform, Twitter/X, to announce to hundreds of millions of users that he “fully” endorsed Trump.
A string of conspiracy-ridden posts followed, including one suggesting that the Secret Service’s failure to protect Trump may have been deliberate. He announced that “legacy media” was a “pure propaganda machine” – unlike Twitter/X, which is the voice of the people. His words.
He endorsed Trump Vance (“Sounds of Victory”). He again disparaged the traditional media. And the Wall Street Journal reported that he would be donating around $45m (£35m) a month to a new pro-Trump super PAC (a political action committee that can divert unlimited funds to support particular candidates).
Musk said the amount is not as much as $45 million, and that this mysterious super PAC is not solely dedicated to getting Trump back in the White House, even though Trump himself was happy to welcome it at a rally. Either way, there is a very strong bond between Musk and Trump, and we should be very happy for the two of them.
Except this: Musk owns the primary platform where politicians, journalists and audiences congregate in America today. Sure, Facebook is 10 times bigger, but Mark Zuckerberg is tired of the news and political clutter. Twitter/X is a vital venue for news, opinion, influence and impact. And one man controls it.
Recent history has seen figures like the Hearsts, Beaverbrooks and Northcliffes try to manipulate public opinion to their will, and this week The New York Times reported that propaganda master Rupert Murdoch is trying to change the family’s ways so that media companies can continue to denounce his conservatism to the public even after his death — a new form of posthumous politics.
But the sheer size of Twitter/X means Musk has the potential to eclipse them all, and he can act in secret if he wants to. No one has to know.
The algorithm is a trade secret and completely opaque: we can guess what it does, but we’ll only know what happened if someone inside the company leaks documents or talks to the press.
In the future, there may be some path forward in law for regulators and academics to come up with a way to audit these algorithms and determine whether they are neutral and fair, but that’s a lengthy process that isn’t helpful in a situation like this, where Musk is trying to slow or silence left-wing voices on Twitter/X that could sway the outcome of an election.
“We’ve had CEOs pick sides and make big donations before, but never on this scale with a CEO who also owns the speech platform where people get their information and where news breaks,” Katie Harbath, a tech policy consultant who previously worked on election strategists at Facebook, told Bloomberg.
But Musk wouldn’t do that. This is the kind of conspiracy ramblings that Musk and his good friend David Sachs have been promoting on Twitter/X in recent days. Sachs, a tech entrepreneur like Musk, has been spreading pro-Trump fantasies to his roughly 1 million Twitter/X followers, including describing Kamala Harris’ candidacy as a “coup” and suggesting she’s a puppet of George Soros.
But recall when Musk was furious that his tweets about the US Super Bowl received less engagement (9.1 million impressions) than President Biden’s tweets (around 29 million impressions).
What happened next was revealed by Platformer, a digital magazine covering the technology industry, in February 2023. When an unlucky engineer explained to Musk why his tweets weren’t getting the reach he’d hoped for, he was fired on the spot.
After the Super Bowl, Musk threatened to fire the remaining engineers unless they could “build a system that would allow Musk to exclusively benefit from unprecedented promotion of his tweets to his entire user base,” according to The Verge.
Having broken so many records, Musk is now redefining the word megalomania.
Engineers solved the “problem” by tweaking the code to automatically “approve” all of Musk’s tweets. “The algorithm artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by 1,000 times,” The Verge reports. “At a certain score, his tweets would appear higher in the feed than everyone else’s.”
This is called the “power user multiplier,” and it explains why you see Musk’s tweets so many times on your timeline, even if you don’t knowingly follow him. Musk himself has even joked about it, posting a meme of a woman labeled “Elon Tweets” pulling the hair of a woman labeled “Twitter” and forcing her to eat the tweets, which has been viewed 178 million times.
“This is the system that Twitter engineers who fear losing their jobs are building right now,” The Verge reported.
In other words, we know Musk can and will use Twitter/X to amplify opinions he thinks are important (his own, to take a random example). We also know from research that the platform can be covertly used to do good things in elections, like increasing voter turnout. What we don’t know is whether Musk’s fervent desire to see Trump in the White House will lead him to tweak his own algorithms.
“API changes are reducing visibility on the platform,” said Harvath, who recently noticed a post on her timeline in which Sachs spoke about Trump and wondered why she wasn’t following him.
“I don’t know if it’s because the algorithm knows I’m interested in tech or politics or whatever, or if it’s for some other reason. We don’t really know how Musk is actually distinguishing between what he’s doing as an individual and what he’s letting the platform do.”
Harvath’s motto is “panic responsibly,” and now may be the time to start.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian, is editor of Prospect magazine.