According to a report from Center for Countering Digital Hate, Elon Musk‘s political posts (many of them false and/or misleading) garnered more than 17 billion views on Twitter/X since the billionaire endorsed Donald Trump on July 13, leading up to the 2024 election.
From the report:
Elon Musk’s political posts have amassed 17.1 billion views since he endorsed Donald Trump—over 2 times as many views as all ‘political campaigning ads’ that X has recorded in its political ads disclosure dataset in the same period
For context, in February 2023, Musk was reportedly enraged that President Joe Biden‘s Super Bowl tweet earned higher engagement than his, which set of a flurry of activity inside Musk’s “app-coding braintrust.” Per Rolling Stone: “Eighty engineers were pulled in for the project and worked to ‘investigate various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should’ and to test solutions.”
Upping Musk’s visibility on his own social-media site, then still called Twitter, would have dramatic ramifications for the months that followed, particularly leading up the election year in 2024.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Comparing the impact of Musk’s tweets with political ads on X is interesting, not least of which because political ads themselves were often skewed toward Republican/conservative messaging. According to Washington Post, GOP candidates spent 3 times as much on advertising on X than ads supporting Democrats. So in very real ways, Musk’s high-profile account and the political ads can, and likely should, be seen as the same right-wing propaganda operation.
I have a thread on Twitter/X that tracked the odd torquing of the site’s ad regime under Musk, pushing cheap trinkets and other strange items. Later on, I noticed Koch Network spreading climate disinfo via promoted adverts, followed by nonsensical ads popping up from random Libertarian candidates and disgraced general Mike Flynn. All of which had an unknown impact on scrambling the judgment of American voters.
