A week after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president, President Joe Biden’s team used Musk’s social media platform X — as well as more neutral spaces like Facebook and Instagram — to announce its endorsement. End his re-election campaign.
It’s a testament to how entrenched the platform is among powerful players in the political and media world, as well as users looking for news and live updates on major events. While Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, along with TikTok, boast far more users, X users say keeping up with the news isn’t why they use these platforms, according to a recent study. Pew Research Center Poll. X is the exception: Most of the site’s users say that following the news is one of the reasons they use it, and about half say they regularly get their news from there.
“X is where history happens,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted Sunday alongside a screenshot of Biden’s announcement. While one commenter noted that the same message was also shared on other social media platforms, the narrative remains important to X and its long-promoted company. Efforts to become a “digital city square”.
“Other platforms have emerged with the goal of replacing X, but what events like Biden’s post show is that this is still where people go to make a quick and consequential impact,” said Sarah Krebs, director of the Technology Policy Institute at Cornell University.
Although the site has become a less reliable place to find accurate information, largely due to changes Musk has made since taking the helm. Since 2022, Acquisition, Mask Turned Things Upside Down Many of Twitter’s previous policies, including those related to misinformation and hate speech, emptied its staff And it changed what people saw on the site.
“It doesn’t seem like potential competitors have been able to displace Twitter as the go-to place for political news,” Krebs says. “In a perfect world, a lot of people would have tried to go somewhere else, but these alternatives needed to deliver products that people wanted and used, and they didn’t. Until then, we may see a population of users whose values and practices are at odds with these alternatives.”
As the company’s owner and its most influential user, Musk has also used X to try to influence political discourse around the world – by getting Argument with Brazilian judge On censorship, and the attack on what he calls the “woke mind virus” and amplifying false claims Democrats are secretly transporting immigrants to vote in US elections.
Long before his endorsement of Trump, Musk had increasingly moved to the right in his posts and actions on the platform, reactivating previously banned accounts such as those of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former US President Donald Trump, as well as accounts affiliated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Advertisers who stopped spending on X in response to anti-Semitic and other hateful material were Participate in “blackmail” Musk claimed. On X-Day he announced that he would move the company’s headquarters, as well as SpaceX’s, to the red state of Texas from deep blue California.
“The big thing about Twitter for a long time was the community of users who embraced it. There’s a proliferation of journalists, elected officials, and thought leaders who still use it today,” says Mark Jablonowski, chief technology officer at DSPolitical, a digital advertising firm that works for Democratic campaigns. “It’s a powerful way to get a quick message out to a large, influential group of people. And yet that group is clearly shrinking. You’re seeing users jump ship left and right. And you’re seeing content become more extreme and unsuitable for public consumption.”
Biden’s message was posted on X on Sunday two minutes before it was posted on Meta platforms like Facebook and Threads. It’s not clear if that was intentional, and the campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Monday.
“It might have been a matter of who presses the enter key first internally,” Jablonowski said. “But I think you’re definitely seeing a world where this might have been exclusive to Twitter five years ago, and now you’re seeing it across many different properties.”
He noted that political campaigns need to meet voters where they are — and for many of them, that is still the case.
“Democrats are still on Fox News,” he added.
But when it comes to ad dollars, “the money clearly goes to Meta and YouTube properties. And I don’t know, at least on the Democratic side, of many campaigns, if any, that are looking to spend ad dollars on (X).”