A week after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president, President Joe Biden’s team announced it would end its reelection campaign using Musk’s social media platform, “X,” in addition to more neutral spaces like Facebook and Instagram.
It’s a testament to how entrenched the platform is among political and media figures, as well as users looking for live updates on news and major events. Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and TikTok boast far more users, but a recent Pew Research Center survey found that X users say following news is not why they use those platforms. X is an exception, with the majority of the site’s users saying it’s why they use it, and about half saying they get their news from there regularly.
“X is where history happens,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted Sunday alongside a screenshot of Biden’s announcement. Commenters noted that the same message has been posted on other social media platforms, but the story remains important to X and its long-standing efforts to become a “digital town square.”
“Other platforms have emerged with the goal of replacing X, but events like Biden’s post show that this is still the place people turn to for quick and significant impact,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell University Technology Policy Institute.
Since Musk became CEO of Twitter, the site has undergone major changes that have made it a less trustworthy place to find accurate information. Since acquiring it in 2022, Musk has reversed many of the old Twitter policies, including those around misinformation and hate speech, fired staff and changed what people see on the site.
“Competitors seem unable to displace Twitter from its position as the go-to place for political news,” Kreps said. “In an ideal world, many people would, and do, try to move elsewhere. But these alternatives needed to deliver a product that people wanted and used, and they haven’t delivered. Until then, there will be segments of users for whom their principles and practices are at odds.”
As an X owner and perhaps its most influential user, Musk has also used it to try to sway political debate around the world, sparring with a Brazilian judge over censorship, lashing out against what he calls the “woke mind virus,” and spreading the false claim that Democrats are secretly flying in immigrants to vote in U.S. elections.
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Long before his support for Trump, Musk had been moving increasingly right-wing in his posts and actions on Twitter, reinstating previously banned accounts including those of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former US President Donald Trump, as well as those of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Musk has argued that advertisers who stopped spending on X in response to anti-Semitic and other hateful content were engaging in “intimidation.” It was also at X that Musk announced he was moving his company’s headquarters, and SpaceX’s, from heavily Republican California to Republican Texas.
“What’s important about Twitter is the community of users who have been on it for a long time, and journalists, elected officials and thought leaders still use it,” said Mark Jablonowski, chief technology officer at DSPolitical, a digital advertising firm that supports Democratic campaigns. “And it’s an effective way to get your message out to a large, influential group quickly. But that group is clearly declining. We’re seeing Twitter users leave in droves, and content is becoming more and more extreme and unfit for public consumption.”
Biden’s Sunday message was posted to X two minutes before it appeared on meta platforms like Facebook and Threads. It’s unclear whether this was intentional, and the campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Monday.
“It may have just been a question of who hit enter first internally,” Jablonowski said, “but I think it’s safe to say that what was on Twitter five years ago is now on a variety of sites.”
Political campaigns need to meet voters where they are, he noted, but for many, that’s still X.
“Democrats are still on Fox News,” he said.
But when it comes to ad spending, “it’s clear that money is flowing to Meta properties and to YouTube. I don’t think there are very many campaigns, at least on the Democratic side, that are willing to spend ad dollars on (X).”