US Election 2024: Elon Musk’s X is helping Donald Trump’s prospects by ’vanishing’ Democrats, says report
- A Washington Post analysis found that Republicans are posting more, getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show.
The top political accounts on X have seen their audiences crumble in the months before the election, a signal of the platform’s diminishing influence and usefulness to political discourse under billionaire owner Elon Musk, a Washington Post analysis found.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have struggled to win the attention they once enjoyed on the platform formerly known as Twitter, according to The Post’s review of months of data for the 100 top-tweeting congressional accounts, including senators, representatives and committees, equal parts Democrat and Republican.
But some of their tweets are still going mega-viral — virtually all of them from Republicans, the analysis shows. The Republicans have also seen huge spikes in follower counts over the Democrats, and their tweets have collectively received billions more views.
X has seen a dramatic exodus of users since Musk took over in 2022, according to independent analysts such as Edison Research, which said in March that X’s usage in the United States had dropped 30 percent since last year. The investment firm Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.
But the viewers that have stayed on X now largely see posts that skew toward the political bent of Musk himself, an avid booster of former president Donald Trump who has jumped onstage with him at rallies, donated $118 million toward his bid for a second term and launched a daily $1 million giveaway for registered voters in swing states. Musk, the world’s richest man, paid $44 billion to buy X and has since become its biggest user, with 200 million followers.
It’s almost impossible to say whether X is explicitly suppressing Democrats, as some liberals have speculated: The Post’s analysis turned up no evidence of direct manipulation. The shift in attention could reflect changing attitudes among users who have stuck around, given that many left-wing users have said they left the platform of their own accord, annoyed by Musk’s antics and X’s redrawn rules.
But the transformation of a platform once obsessed over by politicians, journalists and news junkies has nevertheless fueled agitation among Democrats over lost opportunities for messaging during an election year that has been bitterly fought over online. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that, of the people who post about political issues on X, Republicans were much more likely to say their “views are welcome there.”
“It’s not a right-leaning platform, it’s right-led,” said Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies social media platforms.
“In the past political actors on both sides saw Twitter as the place to go to get news coverage and a sense of how people were reacting … but it doesn’t have that real political centrality anymore,” she added. “Now, for Republicans, it’s become a place for partisan signaling — to the leader of the party; to the owner, who’s very close to him; to each other — that I’m a good Republican, and this is what that looks like now.”
The shift has alarmed White House officials, who worry their official X account’s drop in engagement could hinder their ability to reach Americans during moments of crisis, according to a person familiar with Biden administration discussions on the matter. The White House’s account dropped from an average of more than 200,000 views per tweet last summer to roughly 100,000 today, the analysis found.
X representatives and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The Post analyzed follower counts, view counts and other information from roughly 150,000 tweets dating to July 2023 using data provided by the National Conference on Citizenship, a civic nonprofit organization. The analysis reviewed the top 50 Democratic and 50 Republican congressional accounts, ranked by platform activity since this summer, and excluded retweets and replies.
Changes under Musk to X’s recommendation algorithm, which decides which posts to promote or bury in people’s feeds, have prioritized popular content from around the platform over posts from the accounts a user chooses to follow. That opaque system makes it challenging to know why some tweets go viral more often than others.
But right-wing tweeters have clearly benefited under Musk’s reign. Nearly all of the 33 tweets with more than 20 million views since last summer came from Republicans, the analysis shows. The most viral posts, from the House Judiciary Committee and its chair Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), warned “you’re not safe in Democrat-run Philadelphia” and included a meme relating to the bogus Trump-repeated claim that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating cats.
Since July 2023, the Republicans in The Post’s analysis have seen huge booms in their follower counts. Seventeen of the 20 accounts with the biggest follower growth are Republicans, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri), who gained around 500,000.
One of the few Democrats to gain in the rankings, Rep. Colin Allred (Texas), secured about 35,000 new followers; he’s competing for the Senate seat of Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who gained more than 400,000. Ten members in the data actually lost followers — all of them Democrats.
Most of the accounts’ posts make less of an impression now than during X’s more vibrant past, the analysis shows. The typical post from a Republican last month was seen about 7,900 times, a little over half as many views as it would have gotten in July 2023. But it was still seen more than the average Democratic post, which received 4,100 views last month, down from 5,600 last summer.
The Republicans are posting more now, too, allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds. The Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023 — more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion, the analysis found.
Also Read | Why are Democrats losing black voters?
Democrats have voiced suspicion over whether X is treating left-leaning accounts more harshly, such as when the platform briefly suspended a “White Dudes for Harris” account shortly after it helped raise millions for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. X did not respond to questions for what caused the suspension, which Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York) in July described as “platform censorship.”
Under Musk, the platform has secretly throttled traffic to the New York Times and other sites Musk has vilified; reinstated previously banned political accounts; and launched a payment system for influencers whose first beneficiaries skewed hard right.
Musk also has a history of bending the platform to his whims. After a Super Bowl tweet of his underperformed President Joe Biden’s, Musk directed X engineers to boost his posts higher in people’s feeds to maximize global attention to himself. In August, he devoted X’s most premium real estate to a two-hour chat with Trump, who later endorsed a plan to give Musk a leadership role in reducing government spending.
Despite X’s declining engagement, the platform has regularly depicted itself as near the peak of its influence. X said this month it was seeing “all-time highs in usage,” with 547 million monthly active users spending 363 billion “user-seconds” a day. And in August, the company said its platform had more Democrats than Republicans, adding, “There’s a place for everyone in the global town square.”
X’s changing policies and conversations have driven some users off the platform and to a small but growing group of social media competitors. After X recently redrew its rules to allow blocked users to see a user’s tweets, the social network Bluesky said it gained half a million new users in a single day.
But the company has found one potentially lucrative niche: right-wing political advertising. A Post analysis earlier this month found that the backers of Republican candidates were outspending Democrats on the platform three to one.
Cat Zakrzewski contributed to this report.
The Post analyzed engagement data from 150,000 tweets, excluding retweets and replies, from July 2023 to Oct. 23, 2024, from the most active 50 Democratic and 50 Republican accounts associated with Congress, including both campaign and official accounts for senators, representatives and committees. Accounts were ranked for activity based on their number of tweets between July 1, 2024, and Oct. 22. The X data was provided by the National Conference on Citizenship. View counts were measured, on average, more than three days after the tweet was posted; the 10th percentile tweets by age at collection time were collected one day after posting. Data about the number of tweets from Democrats and Republicans in 2022 and 2024 analyzed all such Congress-affiliated accounts, regardless of how active they were.
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Business NewsNewsUs NewsUS Election 2024: Elon Musk’s X is helping Donald Trump’s prospects by ’vanishing’ Democrats, says report
First Published:29 Oct 2024, 06:11 PM IST
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