When Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion again in 2022, all of us kind of thought he did it so he may promote his personal shitty memes and lame jokes on the social media website. Now, just a few years later, he’s confirmed everyone proper, however as an alternative of these jokes and horrible memes, it’s right-wing MAGA propaganda and hate speech. The actual rub? That shit from Musk goes to indicate up in your timeline whether or not you need it to or not.
In case you’re a frequent X consumer like I sadly am, you’ve in all probability seen Musk’s posts present up in your “For You” web page even when you by no means work together with him or accounts much like his. You’re not imagining issues. Musk actually is blasting his 20-or-so dumbass musings a day to only about everybody on X. I suppose his 203 million followers aren’t sufficient to make him really feel seen.
Fortune determined to determine if this was just a few kind of bizarre anomaly or if Musk was actually pushing his posts out to everybody who makes use of the app. Right here’s what they did with 12 check accounts with completely different pursuits for 5 consecutive days in late October.:
Fortune performed a multi-day experiment to gauge simply how prevalent Musk actually is on his social media platform. In roughly 90% of the classes on X that Fortune performed — by way of a dozen completely different check accounts — a submit from Musk appeared no less than as soon as within the timeline, often way more typically.
Not one of the X accounts that Fortune created for the experiment adopted Musk or actively engaged along with his content material. And but inside two classes, all 12 of the check accounts had been uncovered to Musk’s tweets in X’s algorithmically-powered “For You” feed.
The outcomes appear to corroborate reviews that Musk has continued to place his thumb on the algorithmic scale to amplify his personal tweets, they usually add vital new particulars that present how the world’s richest individual has managed to acquire a well-liked communications platform and refashion it into a private software to affect public opinion. A spokesman for X didn’t reply to emails and texts searching for remark.
Among the many Musk tweets that appeared in Fortune’s check account feeds was one falsely claiming “The Dems have imported huge numbers of illegals to swing states” with the intention to create “a one-party, deep blue socialist state.” There have been a number of Musk posts selling Trump’s look on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in addition to a current rally in New York throughout which Musk spoke. Musk shared a number of anti-Harris commercials, together with one funded by Musk’s pro-Trump political motion committee that refers back to the Vice President utilizing misogynistic vulgarities.
Political content material, whether or not authored by Musk or different customers, accounted for vital parts — in a single case 83% — of the tweets that appeared within the feeds of the check accounts.
Even clicking “not excited about Elon Musk” (an possibility customers may at one time choose for all celebrities on Twitter however which now seems to be out there solely with respect to Musk and a handful of others) didn’t exorcize Musk from the feed. In truth, after one Fortune check account clicked the choice to declare itself apathetic in the direction of the tech billionaire, posts from Musk greater than doubled.
We are able to’t escape Elon, people. Fortune spoke with former Twitter workers who stated there’s successfully “no probability” that the “For You” feed would organically pull that many posts from only one individual or one subject. It was supposedly designed to be “as impartial as doable” and pull content material for a consumer primarily based on their chosen pursuits and site till the consumer engages with sufficient different content material to steer the algorithm in a distinct course.
It’s like there’s some kind of “guide override” occurring right here, as Fortune explains:
The opposite former worker famous that, with the intention to get a lot of the identical content material in entrance of customers, it’s nearly sure that “a guide override” is happening, injecting Musk and political content material into the “For You” suggestion algorithm no matter a consumer’s pursuits.
Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it X, has set about radically revamping the service, firing 1000’s of staff, closing workplaces, and bringing again scores of maximum accounts that had been banned. He stated the adjustments, together with the close to elimination of content material moderation groups working to maintain consumer feeds freed from offensive posts, was with the intention to deliver “free speech” to a platform he claimed had been managed by activist workers, the federal government and advertisers
In 2023, Musk reportedly fired an engineer who informed him that consumer views on his tweets had been declining. An 80-person crew was tasked with attending to the underside of the difficulty and fixing it, the Verge reported. The end result was apparently a code change that ensured Musk’s tweets wouldn’t get flagged by the filters that sometimes type tweets for various customers of the service in response to their pursuits.
Fortune says every account session on the 12 profiles lasted 5 minutes and handed by round 60 to 100 posts every time. Throughout two-thirds of the classes, Musk was one of many first three posts that appeared on the high of a consumer’s feed. General, he was by far the commonest account throughout all feeds. Right here’s what else Fortune found:
Whereas eight of the 12 accounts confirmed no posts from Musk on the primary day of utilization, his posts appeared every subsequent day, and with elevated frequency, regardless of the absence of engagement with Musk content material, Fortune discovered.
An account with chosen pursuits of journey, careers and science went from being served two posts by Musk in a single session, to 22 posts by Musk in a later session. Almost all the accounts, no matter what they chose as matters of curiosity, skilled the same trajectory, going from only a few Musk posts to many, generally dozens.
Whereas Musk tweets about quite a lot of matters, together with SpaceX, Tesla, and his different varied companies, Republican celebration rhetoric has change into a mainstay. One Musk current tweet that appeared in Fortune’s check accounts featured a meme purportedly criticizing an absence of voter identification necessities, regardless of most states requiring identification to vote in-person. And one other of a meme relating to inflation, arguing its increased than President Joe Biden claims utilizing an image of Hunter Biden.
Throughout all the accounts, day after day, politics was clearly the primary topic, and overwhelmingly in-line with Musk’s personal political beliefs. Political content material made up wherever from 19% to 83% of the “For You” feed on the completely different accounts, regardless of 10 of the 12 accounts partaking with no such content material. Of that political content material, between 55% and 82% of it was clearly pro-Trump or clearly anti-Harris, Fortune’s evaluation discovered. Out of roughly 4,500 X posts that Fortune logged, simply 46 had been clearly pro-Harris.
Twitter actually is hell, however it’s a hell I’m very a lot part of. Might I go away and be part of one thing like Bluesky? Certain, however I’m not a fucking dork, so I believe I’ll keep put.
