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Since The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday revealed that Elon Musk has pledged to shell out $45 million per month to help Donald Trump win this year’s presidential election, a lot of people have pointed out that these donations, along with those of some other uber-wealthy Republicans, are yet another sign of how broken the US campaign finance system is.
However, there is a much bigger problem than the millions of dollars that conservative tech bros can spend to swing the election Trump’s way: Musk’s control of Twitter*.
A couple of years ago, the billionaire still pretended to be a largely apolitical centrist… and he played that role well enough to dupe the The New York Times into publishing a story that denied the obvious, which is that Musk is a conspiracy-theory spreading, right-wing tycoon who is using his money and his platform to help Republicans.
Looking back, that article from 18 months ago seems ridiculous.
Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear.
That seems incredibly naïve. If The New York Times wanted to know where a man who has consistently espoused and amplified GOP talking points stood politically, its reporters could have just read WhoWhatWhy.
In any case, by openly supporting Trump, Musk is now putting (some of) his money where his mouth has been for some time.
Obviously, there are lots of modern-day oligarchs and deep-pocketed American aristocrats on both sides who can pump nearly unlimited amounts of money into the race.
Musk, however, has something else to offer Republicans: control over one of the largest online platforms in the world.
After purchasing a majority of Twitter shares for $44 billion more than two years ago, there are now completely new ways in which he can put his thumb on the scale.
His motivation is clearly not profit. After all, Twitter is now worth significantly less than Musk paid for it, which doesn’t seem to bother him. However, it begs the question: What is his plan?
There are plenty of things he could do.
He has already reinstated the accounts of extremists who had been banned from the platform, which has taken a right turn over the past couple of years.
On Wednesday, he pretended to be a fair broker.
“We have recently received many requests to suspend or otherwise impact accounts on the left,” he wrote on his platform. “However, X is a free speech platform that aspires to give equal voice to all, within the bounds of the law. That is what we will do.”
Of course, this comes from the same guy who tried to obscure his true political views until it was no longer possible to do so, so let’s take any statement Musk makes with a grain of salt.
In any case, if you control the algorithm, then you don’t have to shut down accounts to limit their visibility.
There is no way of telling whether this is happening, or whether Musk amplifies the tweets of users aligned with his views.
And that’s a much greater problem than him pledging to give about $200 million to a pro-Trump political action committee.
Editor’s Note: While Elon Musk has changed the name of the platform from “Twitter” to “X,” we are not interested in catering to the whims of every billionaire manchild. That is why we will keep using Twitter and trust that our astute readers will be able to figure out what we are talking about. For more on this, please read “Elon Musk Has an Xtremely Stupid Idea.”
