Musk Reinvented Platform Power. We Should Take Heed
João C. Magalhães / Dec 4, 2024
We thought we knew how social media regulated speech. Anyone could say anything – as long it conformed with the sprawling private bureaucracies companies designed. A complex amalgam of algorithms, trust and safety staff, moderators, and data annotators, these systems had an impossible goal: to enforce multiple rights, not only freedom of speech, at a planetary scale. Expectedly, results were highly imperfect, to say the least, with automation entrenching a new, opaque form of injustice. But systematic partisanship was not the goal. Sure, no one could vote for the executives of companies like YouTube and Instagram or freely participate in their policymaking. Yet these organizations appeared to be guided, if not by democratic practices, at least by key liberal ideals. This mode of operation, developed during the last decade, helped retain users and attract risk-averse advertisers. Despite conservatives’ fury at these content moderation practices, they appeared for some time to be the only viable model for large platforms – including Twitter.
Enter Elon Musk. More than a “mere” multi-billion dollar corporate acquisition, his transformation of Twitter into X is best understood as an intensely political process from which emerged a different Musk and, more importantly, a radically different way of producing and wielding power through social media. He has proved that speech governance at scale need not entail the sort of top-down liberal bureaucratization we saw emerging in Big Tech companies. In its place, Musk offered not his professed libertarianism but a personal, illiberal project to undermine speech in the name of freedom, in which enforcing partisan bias is the point, not a form of collateral damage. X’s shaping of public discourse is not even its only function. In the long term, Musk's biggest disruption might be showing that content moderation can be a conduit for gaining much broader political influence.
Consider first his personal transformation. When he started buying shares of Twitter in January 2022, Musk was an unfathomably rich social media bully with a newly acquired habit of ranting against the “woke mind virus” and a long history of overseeing toxic workplaces. The man who once backed Barack Obama and sided with progressive causes had all but faded, clearly. But many still perceived him as a 21st-century visionary capitalist who combined business acumen with a world-changing megalomania. Central to these perceptions was the success of Tesla (the company that would help solve climate change) and SpaceX (the company that would take us to Mars) and how he nuanced his aggressiveness by behaving on Twitter as an approachable, weed-smoking magnate-cum-shitposter.
Fast forward almost three years, and he is still an unfathomably rich social media bully. But his previous megalomaniacal plans are now used to justify a more familiar kind of revolution. It involves politics, which he had only dealt with marginally before. Musk is now also a global far-right leader who networks with autocrats and seeks to use the second Trump administration to enact a drastic reform of the modern American state. Some even see him as trying to run a “shadow presidency.”
We still do not know much about the reasons behind this personal metamorphosis. What is clear is that Musk is the first tech baron to become such a powerful political leader and that this transition is indissociable from his transformation of X.
To be sure, his ties with governments predate the acquisition of the social network. The building of Tesla’s “gigafactories” in China depended on him gaining approval from Communist Party officials, a profitable relationship that he has been careful not to jeopardize. SpaceX has been funded by the American government with billions in grants and subsidies. Starlink’s constellation of small satellites has been used by governments and armies, allowing Musk to have a mostly indirect but still concrete influence on the unfolding Russian war in Ukraine, for instance. In these contexts, he still appeared to be a businessman, interested primarily in enriching his companies with public money.
In acquiring Twitter, though, he conquered a completely different territory, brimming with novel possibilities. As “chief Twit” Musk did not need to treat political actors as his commercial partners or clients. Ultimately, they were his subjects, individuals whose most important resource — their public voice — was under the partial but direct control of Musk.
This control had to be perfected, though. Many of his biggest moves — taking Twitter private, trying to neuter advertisers’ influence with subscription-based revenue, slashing the trust and safety staff — aimed at or led to him concentrating even more power. Meanwhile, governmental orders could be treated with selective disregard. His experience at Tesla must have shown him that billionaires like him can afford to play fast and loose with the law.
While he consolidated power, Musk promptly moved to instrumentalize Twitter’s speech-governance system to further his individual interests. There is plenty of evidence that other platforms tipped the balance in favor of the powerful. Facebook’s “Cross-Check” program whitelisted 5.8 million users from sanctions. As in other similar cases, though, that program seemingly protected politicians and other public figures from across the spectrum and ran in secret. Musk innovated by choosing to act in an openly partisan manner. The right, far-right, and adjacent actors were welcomed back; rivals and competitors, on the other hand, would have to suffer the consequences of changing policies decreed via Musk’s personal account. It involved more than reinstating or removing posts and accounts. Reach, he proclaimed, was more important than speech.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in how X created a blatantly partisan form of algorithmic amplification, engineering overnight a global captive audience for conservative ideas. Instead of doing so piecemeal, tinkering with the recommendation system to boost the visibility of specific accounts, this strategy seems to have been mainly pushed through by forcing all Twitter users to see Musk’s posts, retweets, and replies. He confirmed these “adjustments to the uh … ‘algorithm’”, unthinkable in any other large social media platform, with a misogynistic meme. Musk became the inescapable and proud gatekeeper.
Such explicit acknowledgment was an exception. If Musk obviously wanted others to see that he was acting despotically, he would rarely openly admit his own despotism. Instead, he persistently tried to convince the public that his actions constituted a radical but principled defense of free speech itself. For that to sound credible, it needed to appear legitimate: fair, necessary, and representative of users. Doing this involved what is best described as a propaganda campaign. Musk disseminated falsehoods, made empty promises, engaged in self-victimization, and concocted or amplified conspiracy theories about content moderation itself — e.g., the so-called “Twitter Files,” Musk’s attempt to manufacture a scandal out of widely known moderation practices.
His use of easily manipulable and unrepresentative “polls” to justify some high-stakes decisions, such as the reinstatement of Trump’s account, was an obvious attempt to leverage “the people” in his favor. After all, “Vox populi, vox dei.” “Community Notes,” Twitter/X’s system to attach additional information to problematic posts, played a similar if more nuanced, role. While we are yet to see concrete evidence that he directly intervened in this program, its participatory design can be disrupted if a large enough number of partisan users decide to block certain “notes” from appearing on certain posts. That, naturally, did not stop Musk from repeatedly touting the democratic nature of the system.
Platforms are not governments. But the similarities between Musk’s actions on Twitter/X and illiberal autocrats’ state policies are too obvious to ignore. Akin to his newfound allies— such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro— he progressively repurposed structures designed to (however imperfectly) sustain liberal values so as to undermine these very principles. Not unlike modern autocrats, Musk enacted a sort of tyranny under the banner of democracy. Out with enlightened tech absolutism of the past decade, in with a nakedly authoritarian, illiberal approach to content moderation.
Unlike most citizens living in an illiberal country, X users can, in theory, simply leave. And they have done so in droves. If Musk’s near-infinite pile of money enabled him to cover the costs of alienating advertisers, it did not secure growth. Ideologically, X’s diminished user base seems to increasingly resemble that of alt-right platforms like Rumble, not the netizens of the open marketplace of ideas he promised when taking over Twitter.
There are two points to be made on this. First, X need not be as large or ideologically diverse as other platforms. If conservatives understand it as their natural habitat, as many appear to do, it is bound to remain a highly influential social space – where they will network, find information, and vie for attention. In this case, it might be that the sort of despotism Musk displayed in these first three years will be rendered unnecessary or at least less controversial. Financially, Trump’s victory already seems to be wooing advertisers back under the expectation that they can curry favor with the all-powerful Musk.
The second point is perhaps more important. Even if Musk were forced to close X tomorrow, or if he had to drastically curb his illiberalism to comply with the ongoing implementation of strong regulation, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Europe, the (re)creation of the social network has already proved to be extraordinarily important.
For his instrumentalization of speech governance was also an ideological performance. Far-right politicians in the US and abroad heard the loud dog whistle he was blowing and started to see in Musk not only another conservative tycoon but an engaged ally who had the resources and the drive to help them, regardless of the costs. X buys Musk a sort of political capital that budding autocrats could only dream of. This capital positions him to have a say in global affairs, which can bring his companies far more money than the $44 billion he paid for Twitter in 2022. As tech critic Brian Merchant put it, that acquisition, widely seen as a financial disaster, may prove to be “the most fruitful investment he ever made, a bargain really.”
Musk became the first tech baron to transition to politics because he was the first social media owner who paid less attention to the difficulties of global speech governance than to the opportunities that this unique sort of power can bring to those who dare to wield it freely. The conditions that made his takeover possible — wealth, greed, and recklessness — are not unique to him, however. They define much of the tech plutocracy.
Critics should take heed of these changes. In the past three years, journalists and commentators have poured millions of words into decrying the destruction of Twitter and how it has become a cesspool of hate speech and disinformation. We have denounced Musk’s contemptible behavior and his moral hypocrisy. This sort of criticism was justified. But maybe, in hindsight, it was also myopic.
Until Musk, we assumed that social media would not be systematically used for partisan purposes because platform owners were businessmen who needed as many users as possible to sell as many ads as possible. We also assumed that content moderation’s political valence was circumscribed to the regulation of speech – however consequential such regulation was.
The creation of X and Musk’s radicalization exposed something deeper: an unprecedented – but potentially replicable – politicization of platform power. There is no reason to assume that major platforms will blindly follow X’s lead, of course. Companies like Meta are profoundly reliant on advertisers and unlikely to burn cash as Musk did. However, at least in the post-election US context, these organizations might have concluded that illiberal content moderation is not only possible but, to some extent, inescapable.
From this perspective, silently changing their speech governance structures to systematically please Trump and the MAGA crowd could be seen as a logical, politically savvy decision; the incoming administration might not even need to jawbone them to do so. The effusive reactions of Big Tech CEOs to the election results, along with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, suggest that this kind of anticipatory obedience is alarmingly plausible.
In a country where platforms have significant discretion over if and how they govern speech, such a scenario would pose a formidable policy challenge. Not only because illiberal moderation is perfectly legal, but also because the state institutions capable of contesting it will, in the coming years, be controlled by the very actors who stand to benefit from this abuse of power.
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