This Is What $44 Billion Buys You
Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon.
October 30, 2024,
5:23 PM ET
Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a
political weapon.
It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter
was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back
out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go
through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s
alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual
main character. And for what?
Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years
ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case,
the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become
readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5.
For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a
machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with
dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can
reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve
Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s
acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.
Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow
informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on
the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential
incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024
election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC,
has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed
with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud.
Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from
a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in
Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and
place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But
this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system
functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling
locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times,
is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a
sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike
Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to
educate yourself.”
Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low
Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have
reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes,
while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local
elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient
instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about
individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many
instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while
asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the
community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing
ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim,
but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his
job.
The most important feature of the Election Integrity
Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling
through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented
pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election
offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed
is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has
created a bullshit machine.
There are three major components to this tool. The first is
that X exposes its users to right-wing political
content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I
recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding
questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about
technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me
to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I
opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content
from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing
I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an
account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI
whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and
Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta
CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board
meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack
Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the
platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.
Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is
X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to
surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a
new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without
human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this
feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting
machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.
This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong
of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater
reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023
to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more
often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has
encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly
outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post,
“Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more
than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the
platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble
and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which
still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media
members.
The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk
himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious
voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts
and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any
other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA
boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost
in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their
accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On
October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted
that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in
California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?”
he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after
another.”
Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election
victory
On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated
with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering
machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason
the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well.
Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale
of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply
too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes
it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and
coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.
X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and
his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the
2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the
effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time
scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending
carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through
the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting
and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the
mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious
about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to
see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of
it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built
in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s
greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying
it, they’ll start to believe you.”