In April 2022, days after Elon Musk offered to buy the app then known as Twitter, the tech billionaire pledged that under his stewardship the platform would not take sides in politics.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” Musk posted on the app, now renamed X.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
In the two years since then, Musk has transformed the platform, once regarded as the global town square, into an echo chamber amplifying right-leaning causes and in particular former President Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, according to academic research, public opinion surveys, data on X’s most influential users, engagement metrics and reports about X’s working directly with the Trump campaign.
And in recent months, Musk has become one of Trump’s biggest donors and most energetic supporters, turning X into an unofficial house organ for his campaign.
As the election approaches, X’s AI-powered trending section has promoted voter-fraud conspiracy theories and smears against Vice President Kamala Harris, NBC News reported Saturday.
On Tuesday, Musk promoted an X Community — a large group of users — called the Election Integrity Community, which was created by his super PAC, America PAC. The community, which is automatically added to a list of feeds users see when they log into the X when they join it, is full of users spreading conspiracy theories, misinformation, rumors and suspicions about voter fraud. Studies and investigations have found that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S.
All told, Musk’s structural changes to the app have tilted in favor of far-right users and posts, researchers say.
“We do have a lot of evidence to suspect that X is turning more and more far-right by the day,” said Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who studied X’s recommendation algorithm.
Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk maintains that X is politically neutral.
“We’re very rigorous on the X platform about being a fair playing field, a level playing field, being fair to all sides,” he said this month at a town hall event in Pennsylvania hosted by America PAC which has repeatedly backed Trump in ads. “We want both sides to say their piece and to let there be a free debate.”
But Musk’s commitment to neutrality was thrown into doubt soon after he acquired Twitter in October 2022. Within 48 hours of the takeover, he tweeted and then deleted a false anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then the House speaker. Musk also laid off Twitter employees responsible for monitoring misinformation, and he gave far-right users new leeway to engage in homophobic and transphobic attacks. Musk also suspended several high-profile journalists.
Weeks into Musk’s tenure, the app reportedly restored over 62,000 accounts previously suspended for policy violations in an action that Musk called “general amnesty.” Some of them were white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts or accounts that repeatedly boost conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, some progressives and liberals have quit Twitter for other platforms, such as Threads or Bluesky, shifting X’s user base further right.
By May 2023, Musk was reshaping Twitter into a Republican media hub. He hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP primary bid announcement and reversed a ban on political advertising, clearing the way for campaign ads, including ads from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent who now supports Trump. (Some Democrats also advertise.)
Behind the scenes, Musk made further changes that weakened traditional news media’s influence on the platform while benefiting conservative pundits. He restructured X’s blue check mark verification program that previously signaled that an account was noteworthy, offering the checks to anyone who subscribed to his paid service. He also started sharing revenue with accounts that drove engagement and boosted the engagement of premium members in replies, creating incentives for endless arguing.
Last year, the app quietly removed policy language that protected transgender users from harassment — a move that LGBTQ advocates said invited misgendering, a form of bullying. Musk said misgendering should be allowed because it’s “at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.”
And Musk, with the largest account on the platform, has played a personal role in helping make several conservative causes go viral, on subjects from diversity in airlines to an allegedly impending civil war to false accusations that immigrants from Haiti are attacking cats and dogs.
The shifts have remade X’s user base, consolidating a right-wing elite who drive political debate on the app — similar to conservative talk radio hosts who appeared a generation ago. University of Washington researchers dubbed the accounts “newsbrokers” in a report this month, noting they often lack journalistic standards and propagate conspiracy theories and partisan views. Musk has personally boosted many of them, such as @libsoftiktok and the account of conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who was suspended from Twitter before Musk bought it.
And the accounts have muscle. UW researchers found that, in the three days after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, nine right-wing “newsbroker” accounts accumulated 1.2 million reposts, while nine traditional news outlets gathered 98,064 reposts — or one-twelfth the engagement — even though the news outlets have larger followings and adhere to journalistic standards based in factual reporting.
“The information environment on X is becoming more and more oligarchical when it comes to a few accounts controlling the supply of news,” said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral researcher at the UW Center for an Informed Public.
And when the news involves Trump, he said, a handful of right-leaning accounts tend to dominate.
“X is becoming more and more right-wing as a platform,” he said. “X is becoming — and consolidating — the voices of the right wing. Some of them were banned before. They are back.”
Other research has shown conservative content getting a boost. Corsi, of the University of Cambridge, found that “high toxicity tweets and those with right-leaning bias see heightened amplification” on X in a study examining posts about Covid-19 and climate change published in March in the journal EPJ Data Science.
“A lot of the far right returned to Twitter because all of a sudden it looked like a safe space for the far right,” Corsi said.
Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, but X may be his highest-profile political asset. It is one of a variety of vehicles through which he is trying to influence the presidential race, alongside personal appearances in swing state Pennsylvania and more than $118 million he has given to his pro-Trump super PAC for voter turnout.
