Chris Stokel-Walker
In the wake of Donald Trump’s massive Election Day victory, Fox News host Bret Baier questioned whether Elon Musk might be “the future” of the Republican Party. Indeed, Musk hitched his fate to Trump when he bankrolled some of Trump’s campaign through his America PAC, and hit the campaign trail himself as a Trump surrogate in stump speeches and town halls.
Just as significant was the way X, the social media network that Musk bought in 2022 for $44 billion, helped Trump get his message out.
“Elon Musk’s X was the MAGA megaphone,” says social media expert Matt Navarra. “The U.S. election exposed the Achilles heel of traditional media: that social media is a wildfire of influence shaping narratives faster than the old guard can fact-check to counter.”
Navarra says social media played a significant role in helping Trump to his second election—even if it didn’t directly propel him into the White House, reported Fast Company.
Instead, he believes that social media, X in particular, helped push the envelope of what is and isn’t acceptable politically. “Social media platforms have become the front lines of influence, where trust is built or shattered algorithmically, while traditional media clings to a standard of objectivity that fewer audiences really care about,” he says.
It’s a sentiment echoed by others, including Musk himself, who said that his social network has replaced media outright, and claimed X is “the signal” of where society is headed.
That attitude may be a step too far, but it contains a kernel of truth. “Elon and Trump’s relationship represents a convergence of right-wing politics and the tech industry that has been going on for years, but has now reached new levels,” says Jess Maddox, associate professor in social media at the University of Alabama.
Maddox points out that the Musk-Trump relationship has gone beyond “new levels” to something more unprecedented. “When the head of a major platform is invested in the victory of one political candidate, of course that platform will come to push features, content, and ads to benefit their interests,” she says. (Republican-leaning advertisers accounted for 60% of the biggest advertising spends on X from January 1 through November 1, according to data compiled by FWIW News. The Trump campaign was the biggest single spender, paying for $1 million of ads.)
The ability to put one party’s voice forward without room or space for the opposition to respond is normal, says Liam McLoughlin, a lecturer in social media and politics at the University of Liverpool, who compares it to TV adverts. “But to have a space previously known to be a public sphere and effectively turn it into a one-sided campaign platform, that raises real concerns about who owns platforms, the influence these owners are granted in society, and the failure to regulate,” he says. (X did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)
The mutation of what Musk called “the de facto public town square” into a campaigning platform for Trump certainly helped. But it also has a longer-lasting effect on the social network. “X has become an increasingly hostile and unusable place for those not subscribing to right-wing beliefs, which are technological and culture shifts that happened as soon as Musk took ownership,” says Maddox. And emboldened by his favored candidate’s thumping victory, that is unlikely to change.