Conservatives were rightly outraged when social media platforms including Twitter removed links to a New York Post story run weeks before the 2020 elections detailing embarrassing information contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter executives later admitted it was a mistake, an overreaction to the platform’s handling of tweets linking to 2016 Democratic National Committee documents hacked by the Russian government.
But if the removal of the Hunter Biden content was problematic because of its potential impact on the 2020 election, how should we feel about Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) using his platform to give unremitting support to Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy via at times misleading and incendiary election content pushed to millions of users’ feeds daily?
How should we feel about Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) using his platform to give unremitting support to Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy?
A new deep dive by The New York Times last week described Musk as “the richest man in the world [who] has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.” Indeed, even as Musk railed about social media’s Hunter Biden censorship, the Times alleges X worked with Trump’s campaign to stifle a potentially embarrassing Trump story: “After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.” (Musk did not return a request for comment on the Times’ reporting.)
Meanwhile, what to make of Musk’s recent post stating, “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” Musk went on to make a wholly unsubstantiated claim that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to turn millions of noncitizens in the U.S. into voters who will inevitably vote for Democrats.
This, on top of Musk’s commandeering of the @america handle for his super PAC, the millions of dollars he has pledged to a pro-Trump super PAC, and his personal appearances on the campaign trail for Trump. Plus his efforts to gather voter registration information for his super PAC by offering $47 for every referral that results in a petition signature. (The petition pledges support for the First and Second Amendments.)
Musk’s transformation of Twitter to X helps us think clearly about two issues that have been percolating about social media platforms: Should government regulations police speech on platforms for political bias? And what should social media companies do about election-related disinformation?
First on the question of platform neutrality: The best way to think about Musk’s actions is to recall early-20th-century journalist A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Magazines like The Nation or television networks like Fox News have ideological leanings; and the same is true of social media platforms. Those who run the platforms can curate the content and share ideological messages. And just like you can cancel your subscription to a magazine or change the channel, you can unsubscribe from X or fail to run advertising on it, a trend that has accelerated with Musk’s highly partisan actions.
Back when Twitter and Facebook deplatformed Donald Trump after he failed to immediately and forcefully condemn the Jan. 6, 2021, violence at the U.S. Capitol, Florida and Texas each passed laws requiring big social media companies to carry content from politicians, even if it was false or incendiary.
I wrote a brief to the Supreme Court with other professors when those laws were challenged on First Amendment grounds, arguing that social media platforms have the same right to curate content as newspapers. In June, the Supreme Court agreed, saying that these parts of Florida’s and Texas’ laws were unconstitutional. I stand by this principle, even as X’s alleged liberal bias has shifted conservative under Musk, and even as Musk has regularly spread election disinformation. Government control of the content of political speech creates more dangers than it solves.
Government control of the content of political speech creates more dangers than it solves.
But when it comes to election disinformation, Musk has arguably become the biggest offender, regularly sharing election information in posts that are pushed to millions of users daily. It’s kind of an interesting natural experiment.
In 2020, Twitter employed a Trust and Safety team that actively policed election disinformation and labeled some tweets as containing false or disputed content. (That labeling may have backfired, strengthening some people’s beliefs in the false posts.) This election, X has decimated the Trust and Safety team, and all manner of election-related disinformation is flourishing.
What we don’t know is whether any of this new tranche of election misinformation will sway many voters. We will need studies to see if people are more likely to be misled now than they were before, when there was more content moderation. One optimistic possibility is that the zone has been so flooded with false and misleading information that voters have become inoculated to much of it. Those who tend to believe the false information may be people who were already predisposed to believing it. If you think Democrats regularly cheat in elections, these posts will simply confirm your beliefs. If you don’t, you will reject the posts as containing nonsense and maybe leave X for a place with more reliable information.
A deepfake of Kamala Harris is not the biggest threat to this election. Rather, it’s that voters will simply give up looking for the kind of information they need to make informed election choices consistent with their interests and preferences. Voters need more than vibes.
Perhaps our greatest fear should be the impact of Musk inflaming the passions of those who already believe false narratives. How will the public react, and what will those who certify elections try to do, if Trump and Musk fan the flames of voter denial after voters have cast their ballots in November?
Even if the worst does not come to pass, Musk is hastening truth decay, destroying what was once a valuable platform for the quick sharing of information (and sometimes interaction) with leading experts in the world. X is not what it was, and that is a shame.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s view of the First Amendment, we already live in a world where the wealthy can use their considerable resources to have even greater influence over who is elected and what elected officials do when in office. But Musk’s dedication, platform and resources takes unequal influence to a whole new level.
If we are lucky, Musk’s expensive gamble — that he can sway public opinion through a hostile takeover of both a platform and the truth — will backfire. And if we are luckier, American democracy will be able to keep pushing its way through a swamp of false election claims with continued fair elections and peaceful transitions of power.