Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and changed its name to X, he has been accused of banning journalists critical of him and amplifying the views of far-right extremists while simultaneously censoring Democratic voices, all while calling himself a “free speech absolutist.”
BlueSky, Meta’s Threads and others profit from X’s disgruntled users, but they pale in comparison to X’s influence in the information world.
His history of censoring opinions he disagrees with and his full support for Donald Trump have raised concerns that an information vacuum could be created ahead of the crucial US presidential election — after all, a recent Pew Research Center report found that 65% of the platform’s users want news content.
Matt J., who declined to give his last name, works in law in South Carolina and despite running the left-leaning account “Blue Resistors In Red States,” he pushes content from far-right firebrands like Laura Loomer on his “For You” page on an almost daily basis.
“I’m receiving information being pushed to me by far-right people I don’t even follow,” Matt J told Al Jazeera.
Progressive X user Mary Ann Chisholm told Al Jazeera a similar story, saying she is constantly bombarded with content from far-right elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom she has blocked.
“I go on it every day and the people I’ve blocked show up again as people I follow,” Chisholm told Al Jazeera.
On Monday, Elon Musk, who has no journalism experience, interviewed former President Donald Trump for over an hour on a range of issues. Musk gave Trump free reign to spread his message unfiltered and without any fact-checking equipment to expose his lies in real time.
During the interview, Trump was allowed to make false and misleading claims about everything from taxes to immigration. Trump repeated his false claim that the vice president had been appointed Biden’s “border official.” In 2021, Biden ordered the vice president to address not border security but the root causes of migration — why people want to leave their home countries in the first place.
Musk allowed Trump and his allies to speak freely — X CEO Linda Yaccarino even called the interview “unfiltered.”
At the same time, Musk isn’t giving the same freedom to liberal voices trying to spread their message ahead of the general election.
In recent weeks, as Kamala Harris clinches the Democratic presidential nomination, Musk has grown increasingly hostile toward Harris and her campaign. In response to a post by Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, Musk said the vice president’s “philosophy would bring about a virtual holocaust for all of humanity.” Last Wednesday, he falsely claimed that “Kamala is literally a communist.”
His anger at Harris is also reflected in what consumers see in their feeds. Across X, users were unable to follow Harris’ campaign page, KamalaHQ. The issue became so widespread that it caught the attention of congressional leaders. On July 23, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York called on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate why this happened and whether Musk was involved. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is Jim Jordan, who has been a vocal critic of “big tech” political censorship of conservatives.
Nadler and Jordan did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time Musk has been accused of restricting content from users with whom he disagrees, including news outlets and rival social media platforms.
Musk is currently being sued by one of those journalists, former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who claims X canceled his contract to do a show on the platform. The lawsuit comes after Lemon, a longtime news anchor, questioned Musk about hot topics, including the rise of hate speech on X. A representative for Lemon declined to comment due to the pending litigation.
In December 2022, Musk temporarily banned several left-leaning journalists who were critical of him, and he followed up with a similar move in January this year.
Last January, Bloomberg also reported that Musk had pressured his head of trust and safety to suspend Chad Loader, a left-wing activist who used the platform to try to identify participants in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This is reflected in a recent report in Wired, in which several former staffers expressed concern that Musk’s concentration of power within X has allowed him to push his increasingly extreme political positions without any checks and balances.
In recent years, Musk has disbanded the company’s Trust and Safety Council, a group of 100 independent organizations that advise the company on how to tackle issues like hate speech, and dismantled a team tasked with tackling misinformation on the platform.
Throttle Reach
More recently, an account called “White Dudes for Harris” has been in the spotlight. After a July 29 fundraiser raised nearly $4 million from nearly 200,000 supporters, the account was quickly suspended. X reinstated the account within a day, but problems soon arose again. On Tuesday, the group behind the account told Al Jazeera that it had found itself being censored again, this time for being classified as spam.
“I’m not doing anything spammy. We’re not mass following, we’re not mass tweeting, we’re not threatening people, so there’s no reason for us to get in trouble,” Mike Nellis, co-founder of White Dudes for Harris, told Al Jazeera.
Nellis, no inexperienced campaigner but a political communications giant who has worked on digital campaigns for candidates ranging from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to Rep. Adam Schiff and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, said Musk’s censorship efforts stoked concerns about raising awareness of the left’s movement ahead of the general election.
“I received a lot of DMs. [direct messages] “We’re hearing from people who say they voted for Donald Trump twice but are now voting for Kamala Harris and are grateful that we have an account. We’re reaching real people on this platform. I think it’s wrong for Elon Musk to interfere in my politics in this way,” Nellis said.
Matt J, who promotes commentary on liberal issues, agreed, saying he’s noticed fewer people seeing his posts.
“When I look at my analytics page I can see that my posts aren’t getting as much attention as they used to,” Matt J told Al Jazeera.
Matt J., who paid for Twitter Blue (now X Premium), a premium service that gives users more resources, including the ability to create longer posts. The service, created by Musk after the acquisition, promises to give his posts more visibility, and despite his payment, he says his posts still only get a few hundred views, despite having more than 21,000 followers — a significant drop from the tens of thousands of views he once got.
Chisholm, who has more than 70,000 followers, said she has recently seen her views drop by 78 percent.
“When I started actively supporting Kamala, my views dropped from 500,000 to 500 – a big drop,” Chisholm told Al Jazeera.
Chisholm also pays a premium fee and gets access to detailed analytical reports on the performance of his account.
Chisholm, Matt J and Nellis are concerned that censorship will undermine their ability to navigate people to fundraising opportunities.
If your account is suspended [or limited] They’re raising millions for Kamala Harris, but the link isn’t working. [meaning the links no longer lead to anything]”That’s limiting our fundraising and limiting our potential,” Nellis said.
There is widespread fear about what will happen if Musk targets their pages again.
“Tens of thousands of people love our content and flock to our Twitter page to follow us. Losing our account would limit our ability to reach them,” he added.
Musk has also come under fire in recent weeks for his off-platform political activism. CNBC first reported that America PAC, a political action committee run by Musk, was accused of falsely claiming to have registered voters in battleground states. The PAC is currently under investigation by election officials in Michigan and North Carolina.
After the investigation was announced, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson posted that elected officials, including herself and the state’s attorney general, had inexplicably lost the blue checkmark with an X, the icon that denotes the official account of their office.
Other state attorneys general also lost their checkmarks, but only in states such as Arizona and Wisconsin, where Republicans had been charged with involvement in an election fraud scheme that included the Trump campaign’s lies about meddling in the 2020 presidential election.
America PAC did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
X has sought to censor not only left-wing voices but also what it considers liberal causes, such as transgender rights. Since Musk took over the company, X has removed transgender protections from its hate speech policy. In 2023, Business Insider reported that it had restricted the display of tweets containing words like “trans” sent in direct messages.
But Facebook’s decision signals Musk’s personal stance on transgender issues, and he is known for openly using hostile and dehumanizing language to describe transgender people, including one of his own children.
Musk’s move came despite his accusations that the social media giant’s previous management had used their power to support liberal causes and censor conservative voices and causes. In 2022, Musk worked with a handful of right-wing journalists to present what they claimed was evidence that previous Twitter management had shadowbanned conservative voices. The Twitter files were criticized for using cherry-picked data to support Musk’s claims.
Meanwhile, academic studies of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms have found that Musk’s claims are unfounded and that there is no systematic censorship of conservative voices.
X did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.