What Elon Musks endorsement of Donald Trump means for X in 2024

Publish date: 2024-07-29

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What Musk’s Trump support means for X and the election.

Four years ago, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were summoned to a barrage of congressional hearings to testify on their platforms’ handling of the 2020 presidential election. Republican leaders, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), pressed the social media chiefs on allegations of anti-conservative bias — an accusation all three vociferously denied.

As the next presidential election looms, Dorsey is long gone, Twitter is now X, and its new owner has dropped any pretense of personal impartiality. Elon Musk said over the weekend that he “fully endorse[s] President Trump” and is reportedly preparing to donate huge sums to a pro-Trump super PAC.

Musk’s emergence as a leading Trump supporter raises fresh questions about the role X might play in the 2024 election.

From the start, Musk’s bid to take over Twitter was motivated by his opposition to its content moderation policies, and his policies at X have reflected his rightward tilt. That might suggest that his open support of Trump won’t really change much.

Yet for all the speculation about Big Tech’s past biases, this will be the first presidential election in which a major social media platform is controlled by a close public ally of one of the candidates. And that candidate, Trump, has so frequently violated the rules of mainstream social media platforms that they ended up booting him.

Meta, YouTube and X have all since reinstated Trump. Meta said Friday that it would no longer closely monitor Trump’s account for future violations, giving the former president a clean slate as he headed into this week’s Republican National Convention.

As recently as two years ago, it was unclear whether Trump would ever again be able to use mainstream social media again to propel his candidacy. Now the question is whether he would ever again be sanctioned for his posts.

While X has pulled back on some content policies under Musk, its civic integrity policy still prohibits some forms of voting misinformation. But Musk has a track record of changing the company’s rules ad hoc, including in response to conservatives’ complaints or to protect his own interests.

His commitment to Trump raises the prospect of whether Musk would bend or alter the site’s rules to boost his preferred candidate. X did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday on whether it remains committed to impartiality.

Musk could also boost Trump without bending any rules, just by using his massively influential X account to amplify pro-Trump voices — several of which he began following shortly after his endorsement.

In the days after Trump was shot at a rally, Musk touted X as a primary source of news about the incident, urging users to ditch mainstream media and rely for information on his site, where baseless claims flourished in the shooting’s wake. Musk himself helped spark a trending discussion over whether the Secret Service had let Trump down by prioritizing diversity in its ranks.

On Monday, he posted that “the legacy media is a pure propaganda machine,” whereas X is “the voice of the people.”

That rhetoric dovetails with Trump’s long-standing characterization of the media as “fake news,” a line he often used to duck or distract from negative publicity throughout his presidency.

“Conspiracy theories animate MAGA’s rejection of the elite,” said Tom Joscelyn, senior fellow at the online forum Just Security and a principal drafter of the Democrat-led House select committee’s Jan. 6, 2021, report. “So it is no surprise that Musk often shares or endorses conspiracy theories that seek to undermine the public’s confidence in America’s institutions and democracy.

“For example, Musk still repeats debunked claims about noncitizens voting in large numbers in Arizona,” Joscelyn added, an unfounded theory that Trump has often advanced since his 2020 loss. “As we get closer to the election, we should expect that X, and Musk himself, will become awash in these types of false claims.”

But even as mainstream social media appears to be aligning in Trump’s favor, one key figure remains largely absent: Trump himself.

After his exile from the major platforms, Trump launched his own social network, Truth Social. Since then, he has used the site as his primary online megaphone, much as he had Twitter. The site and its parent company, Trump Media, have undergone legal and financial struggles, and at one point, Trump even asked Musk if he might want to buy it. But a recent influx of cash from investors has bolstered its fortunes.

While X reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022, Trump has posted just once since then. People close to him have told my colleague Drew Harwell that Trump resuming full activity on X could jeopardize Truth Social, where his account is the main draw. So far, he seems to be prioritizing his business over the potential to reach a much wider audience on X. In the meantime, a network of Trump allies active on X ensures his messages are still heard there.

Whether Trump comes back to X full-time, Musk’s embrace of his candidacy puts the question of Big Tech’s political biases in a new light.

Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School, joked that perhaps we’ll soon see blue states trying to regulate social media bias the way Texas and Florida have tried to do.

“The enormous power that these private companies (and the handful of billionaires that run them) have over the public sphere is a genuine policy issue, regardless of your politics,” she said.

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Expedia and Intuit have joined tech trade association Internet Works, bringing their membership total to 20 companies.

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The Federal Communications Commission holds an open meeting on Thursday at 10:30 a.m.

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What Elon Musks endorsement of Donald Trump means for X in 2024

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