Let’s be honest: Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The platform is a lot like a cockroach: ugly, roaming, obnoxious, and, despite many efforts, very hard to get rid of. Elon Musk bought the network in late 2022, derided power users, haphazardly fired many of its employees, alienated advertisers, insisted on calling Twitter X, and turned it into a vehicle for edgelord political projects. People left in droves. Yet somehow, here we are in 2024, and X is going strong.
It remains a den of reckless speculation, angry partisanship, and toxicity, but it lives on in ways that are hard to quantify. Joe Biden’s shocking performance at the presidential debate in late June heated up my timeline in a way it hasn’t since 2021. When a gunman gunned down Donald Trump eight days ago, the platform did what it does best: provide a mix of conspiracy theories, up-to-the-minute hard news coverage, and, perhaps most importantly, communal spectatorship (which is truly addictive, despite being awful). The past three weeks have been extraordinarily chaotic, full of infighting, violence, and spectacle that X seems made to document and incite. It all culminated this afternoon with Biden announcing in a series of posts that he was withdrawing from the presidential race. X has always been in the doomscrolling business, and it’s booming.
But if you take a step back, you’ll realize just how awkward this situation is. Joe Biden chose to make one of the biggest announcements in presidential history on a social media site owned and operated by one of his opponent’s biggest donors and most vocal supporters. Musk reacted to the news by posting that his “smartest friend” was voting for Trump, and impulsively replying to X people, “Trump/Vance!!”
Biden staff posted the news on X because, for better or worse, they must have understood that it was the quickest, least intermediary way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse. (As Musk said this afternoon about the mainstream media, “They’re so slow.”) X’s reversion to its old ways means that journalists, pundits, consultants, lawmakers, and die-hard political enthusiasts have settled into a familiar pattern of refreshing the app to consume news in a 24-second news cycle. “Above all, this should be the moment to bring all the liberal defectors back to Twitter/X,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted shortly after Biden’s announcement. “No one can escape the platform now.”
While Musk’s platform is unlikely to see a historic influx of new users, Douthat’s point about inescapability seems right: For anyone obsessed with political turmoil or needing to monitor or cover it over the next four months, X will be extremely hard to avoid.
My favorite explanation for when Musk bought Twitter comes from Nilay Patel of The Verge, who argued that Twitter’s greatest asset wasn’t its technology, but its confused “politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.” No one fits this description more than Musk, a habitual poster. Writing as if he was speaking to Musk, Patel concluded: “You bought yourself for $44 billion.”
This remains true today, but in hindsight it’s also clear that Musk bought the power to pretty dramatically reshape the platform in his own image. Perhaps he overdid it. For the first 18 months of his tenure, the platform seemed to revolve around Musk’s own posts and personality. This was partly algorithmic (Musk reportedly asked engineers to boost his own posts) and partly cultural. Musk was the owner of Twitter and its eternal protagonist. The platform’s “For You” recommended feed sometimes felt as if it was curated by Musk, full of the same corny memes, Reddit-esque viral trash and edgy humor the billionaire shared on his own account.
But Musk’s management may have set in motion the Overton Window, especially among his Silicon Valley peers, namely venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, who have been flirting with the right by lambasting “wokism” on the platform for years. Musk used his account to help launch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign, as well as to reinstate banned accounts of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, trolls, and of course Trump himself. According to a Pew Research Center report, Musk’s decision to use X to explicitly promote a Trumpist political project has further tilted the social network to the right. Among commentators who spend a lot of time on the platform, the mood has clearly shifted. As the platform shifts to the right under Musk’s influence, it’s no surprise that his contemporaries feel comfortable following suit. “The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology, and the future of America is really at stake… We think Donald Trump is actually the right choice. Sorry, mom.”
Silicon Valley venture capitalists aren’t a significant target demographic in the election, outside of fundraising. And perhaps this “mask off” moment just revealed sentiments that have been there all along. Still, thinking about Musk’s role highlights a truth about what he’s actually bought into: a still-important communication channel that, although open to all, can be influenced by his own grudges and ideology, both in subtle and very direct ways.
While wealthy and powerful men have long owned influential media properties and used them in explicitly political ways, X, run solely by Musk, is a bit different. The site has always felt more like a sharing space than an actual journalism arm. Now, its revitalized users must grapple with a difficult question: Should we continue to outsource some of the most active parts of our political conversation to a platform owned by a far-right activist?
In a perfect world, the answer would be a simple “no.” But Musk and Trump’s opponents have reasons to stay. There’s an argument to be made that ceding X’s political battleground to the right would be foolish — that it’s noble and politically wise to stay and wage the ideological battle. Another line of thinking I’ve heard among fellow journalists is that it’s unwise to let go of the large readerships that many have built on the platform. If your goal is to inform, you need the biggest megaphone.
But there are risks to staying: It would give Musk greater influence over the political debate, on a platform where Facebook’s algorithms prioritize the very incendiary content and simplistic interactions that made him one of its most famous and followed users.
Whether or not you are concerned about Musk’s ownership at this point probably depends on your ideology and your views on the importance of Twitter. Today, as Trump supporters struggle to make sense of the new election situation, one far-right influencer in my feed pleaded in capital letters: “GET TRUMP BACK ON X NOW!” This is yet another admission that this relatively small platform still feels important. But there is another way to interpret right-wing shitposters begging for Trump’s return. If X is really so important and drives politics, why doesn’t the biggest presence in American politics, the person who cemented the website’s place in the firmament of political discourse, post on it? The answer is that Trump now has his own platform, Truth Social. After being temporarily banned from Twitter after January 6, he started posting there. Trump’s account is technically back on X, but all he’s posted since 2021 is a photo of himself with his face to promote his website.
Musk’s $44 billion gives him considerable influence, but his political idol remains a rival for now.