The right-wing lurch of X under Elon Musk

The right-wing lurch of X under Elon Musk

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and changed its name to X, he has banned journalists critical of him, and been accused of censoring Democratic voices while simultaneously amplifying those of far-right extremists, even while claiming to be a “free speech absolutist”.

While BlueSky, Meta’s Threads and others have gained from users disaffected with X, they pale in comparison to X’s hold on the information landscape.

His history of censoring views he doesn’t agree with and his full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump has raised concerns that there will be an information void before the consequential United States Presidential election. After all, 65 percent of the platforms’ users go for news content according to a recent report from Pew Research.

Matt J, who declined to give his full last name, works in the legal profession in South Carolina. Despite running the left-leaning account “Blue Resistors In Red States”, he’s pushed content from far-right-wing provocateurs like Laura Loomer, on his “For You” page practically every day.

“I’m getting pushed information from the fringes of right-wing people who I don’t even follow,” Matt J tells Al Jazeera.

Maryanne Chisholm, a progressive X user, tells Al Jazeera something similar. She continually gets pushed by content from far-right elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene who she blocked.

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“I go on every day and people I’ve blocked pop back up as people I’m following,” Chisholm told Al Jazeera

On Monday, Elon Musk, who has no background in journalism, spent more than an hour interviewing former President Donald Trump on a myriad of issues. Musk gave Trump free rein to spread his message unfiltered and without a fact-checking apparatus to debunk his lies in real-time.

Throughout the interview, Trump was allowed to make false and misleading claims ranging from tax policy to immigration. Trump repeated the false claim that the vice resident was appointed as Biden’s “border czar”. In 2021, Biden tasked the vice president with addressing the root causes of migration — why people want to leave their nation of origin in the first place —- not border security.

Musk has allowed Trump and his allies to voice their views unchecked. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, even referred to the interview as “unfiltered”.

At the same time, Musk isn’t giving the same freedom to liberal voices who are trying to get their messaging across before the general election.

In recent weeks, amid Kamala Harris’s clinch of the Democratic presidential nomination, Musk has increasingly become more hostile towards her and her campaign. In response to a post from Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, Musk said that the sitting vice president’s “philosophy would cause a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!” Last Wednesday, he made the false claim that “Kamala is quite literally a communist.”

His angst towards Harris is also translating to what consumers see on their respective feeds. Across X, users were unable to follow KamalaHQ, Harris’s campaign page. The issue was so widespread that it caught the attention of congressional leaders. On July 23, New York Representative Jerry Nadler called on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate why this happened and if Musk had any involvement. The House Judiciary Committee is chaired by 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 request for comment.

This is not the first time that Musk has been accused of throttling content from users who he does not see eye to eye with, including news organisations and competing social media platforms.

Musk currently faces a lawsuit from one journalist — former CNN anchor Don Lemon about X allegedly cancelling a deal with him for a show on the platform which came after the longtime news anchor questioned Musk about the rise in hate speech on X among other hot button topics. Representatives for Lemon declined to comment due to the pending suit.

In December 2022, Musk temporarily banned a handful of left-leaning journalists critical of him and did this again this past January.

Last year in January, Bloomberg reported that Musk also pressured the head of trust and safety to suspend Chad Loder — a left-wing activist who used the platform to identify participants of the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol.

That’s echoed by recent reporting from Wired which cited several former staffers voicing concerns that Musk’s consolidation of power within X has allowed him to push his own increasingly fringe political stances without checks and balances.

In recent years, Musk dissolved the Trust and Safety Council – a group of independent 100 organisations that advised the company on ways to tackle issues like hate speech, and dismantled teams dedicated to addressing misinformation on the platform.

Throttling reach

Most recently, the account “White Dudes for Harris” is in the spotlight. After a fundraising call on July 29 that raised roughly $4m from about 200,000 supporters, the account was immediately suspended. Within a day X reinstated the account but it soon had more trouble. On Tuesday, the group behind the account told Al Jazeera they discovered they were once again being censored. This time it’s being labelled as spam.

“I haven’t done anything that is spammy. Like we’re not bulk-following people. We’re not bulk-tweeting people. We’re not, you know, terrorising people. So there’s no reason for us to get in trouble,” Mike Nellis, co-creator of White Dudes For Harris, told Al Jazeera.

Nellis is not an inexperienced campaigner, he is a political comms juggernaut who has worked on digital campaigns for candidates ranging from Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to Representative Adam Schiff and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Musk’s censorship efforts, he said, stoked concerns about raising awareness for left-leaning causes in the run-up to the general election.

“We’ve gotten a lot of DMs [direct messages] from people who tell us that they voted for Donald Trump two times, they’re thinking about voting for Kamala Harris this time, and they appreciate that our account exists. We’re reaching real people on this platform. I think it’s wrong of Elon Musk to put his thumb on the scale for his own politics this way,” Nellis said.

That’s echoed by Matt J, who pushes commentary on liberal issues. He said he noticed that fewer people have been seeing his posts.

“I can see on my analytics page that my posts aren’t getting as much traction as they used to,” Matt J told Al Jazeera.

Matt J, who paid for Twitter Blue (now X Premium) — the platform’s paid service which gives users more resources including a feature that allows users to craft lengthier posts —  says despite paying for this service – created by Musk after his takeover – which promises posts will get more exposure, some of his are getting only a couple hundred views despite having more than 21,000 followers. This is drastically down from the tens of thousands of views he used to get.

Chisholm, who has more than 70,000 followers, says she has seen a 78 percent drop in views more recently.

“When I started actively, aggressively supporting Kamala. My views dropped from half a million to five hundred. It was a huge drop,” Chisholm told Al Jazeera.

Chisholm also pays for premium and has access to in-depth analytic reports on her account’s performance.

Chisholm, Matt J and Nellis are concerned that censorship undermines their ability to point people to fundraising opportunities.

“If our account is suspended [or limited] at a time when we’re raising millions of dollars for Kamala Harris and our links come up dead [meaning the links no longer lead to anything], that limits our fundraising. It limits our potential,” Nellis said.

There is a looming fear of what will happen if Musk targets their page once again.

“Tens of thousands of people are flocking to our Twitter page to follow us because they like our content and if our account is no longer there, that limits our ability to reach them,” he added.

Musk has been in hot water for his role in politics off of the platform in recent weeks, as well. America PAC, a political action committee run by Musk, has been accused of falsely claiming to register voters in swing states, as first reported by CNBC. The PAC is now under investigation by election officials in both 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, inexplicably lost their blue checkmarks on X — the icon that indicates official accounts for the office.

Other state attorneys general lost their checkmark, but seemingly only in states like Arizona and Wisconsin – where Republicans had been indicted for their roles in fraudulent elector schemes, including the Trump team’s lies about election interference in the 2020 presidential election.

The America PAC did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

It is not left-wing voices but also causes that are deemed as liberal causes — like trans rights — which X has made efforts to censor. Since Musk took over the company, X removed transgender protections in its hate speech policy. In 2023, Business Insider reported that it limited visibility on tweets sent via DM that included words like “trans”.

But the platform’s decisions are indicative of Musk’s personal stance on trans issues and he has been known to use openly hostile and dehumanising language to describe trans people, including one of his children.

Musk’s moves come despite his accusations that the social media giant’s previous leadership put their thumb on the scale to help liberal causes and censor conservative voices and causes. In 2022, Musk worked with a handful of right-leaning journalists to showcase what he alleged was proof that previous Twitter leadership shadowbanned conservative voices. The Twitter Files was accused of using cherry-picked data to support Musk’s case.

Meanwhile, academic studies of the anti-conservative bias on social media platforms have found that Musk’s allegations were baseless and there was no systematic censoring of conservative voices.

X did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.