Tech billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was on display throughout the recent US presidential election campaign record high usage.
The platform – and Musk particularly – played a vital role in promoting the views of newly elected President Donald Trump.
Musk was very happy with that. When Trump's victory became clear, Musk was there confirmed as head of a brand new US government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency – quickly told his greater than 200 million followers on X:
They are the media now.
But who exactly will that be in the long run? And how is X prone to change in the approaching years during a second Trump presidency?
The “every little thing app”
Musk has been pretty clear about his plans for X since he became the platform's owner and CEO in October 2022. At the time he infamously tweeted:let that sink in” with a visible “dad joke.”
Then, just over 12 months later, he told X employees that he had madeEverything app” for the USA.
Its goal is to create a platform for messaging, payments, videos and more, just like China's WeChat. This will now be possible for him with increased capital. At the time of writing, Musk's net value is estimated to have skyrocketed increased by around $70 billion for the reason that election to a complete of over $300 billion.
Musk and with it too
Since the election, he's already posted thoughts and polls on government spending cuts, who needs to be the U.S. Senate majority leader, and deregulation (together with one other “let that sink in” dad joke, this time to the Oval Office).
Research suggests that he also recently tweaked X's algorithm to enhance his own contributions.
However, not every little thing is rosy for Musk. He is currently facing one Class motion lawsuit about his $1 million-a-day donation within the run-up to the presidential election, with registered voters who had signed his petition for a likelihood at victory now claiming it was a fraud.
Increasing misinformation
Since the election last week, it has already been observed that conspiracy theories are spreading on X, this time too Claims of election interference from the political left.
This poses an issue because the present approach of
Recent research has shown that Community Notes doesn't work to scale back exposure to misinformation. Although Musk claimed last yr that Community Notes “will probably be the perfect source of knowledge on the Internet, period“.
Meanwhile, quite a few studies show that misinformation about X continues to rise, including about US politics.
The advancement of generative AI tools and automation only increases the potential for things like foreign influence operations on X in the long run.
musk has also stripped academic researchers of access to data on X. Other platforms equivalent to Facebook and Reddit did the identical.
This makes it tougher than ever to find out the precise extent and severity of misinformation on the platform.
Cyberbalkanization
So, given the increasing concentrate on right-wing US politics and the greater likelihood of misinformation during Trump's second term, who’s prone to stay on X?
Since the election, alternative social media platform Bluesky has reportedly Gained 1 million members as some X users attempt to escape the supposedly right-wing extremist platform.
Our own evaluation of Google Trends search data from the US suggests an identical story.
On election night, there was a transient spike in searches for Trump's own social media platform, Truth Social, presumably because viewers were wondering what Trump would say when the outcomes got here in.
Since then, nevertheless, there was a spike in US users trying to find Bluesky, and the number didn’t drop to pre-Election Day levels over the next weekend. For comparison, we don't see similar trends in other countries like Australia, or a rise in search traffic for other social media platforms like Mastodon, a smaller X alternative, or Threads.
Nevertheless, X stays much larger than BlueSky, Threads and Truth Social by a large margin.
If these trends proceed, it might be evidence that “Cyberbalkanization“. This is where the web splits into separate communities or tribes that don't communicate with one another.
Impacts may include increased confirmation bias inside these communities and reduced resilience to disinformation or foreign influence.
Analysis suggests the US has already done this low resilience to disinformation of this sort.
Unfortunately, these risks for X and its users seem like increasing in the long run as we approach Trump's second term.
