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Research reveals billionaire Elon Musk’s social media posts had a ‘sudden boost’ once he backed Donald Trump
- Elon Musk backed Donald Trump, and his social media posts has a 'sudden boost' where his posts got higher views, retweets and likes in comparison to other prominent political accounts on the platform raising suspicions that Musk may have tweaked the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts. The founder of X (formerly Twitter) has a history of algorithmically boosting his posts to reach more people. Other conservative and right-wing X accounts have performed better in terms of visibility compared to progressive and left-wing accounts since July.
- Musk promotes Trump's re-election and has donated around 100 million dollars over the past three months to a political action committee called America PAC that's promoting Trump.
- The data spans from January 1 2024 to October 25 2024. Since July, engagement with Musk's X account has seen a sudden and significant increase. The view counts for his posts increased by 138%, retweets by 238%, and likes by 186%, while other prominent political accounts on X saw more moderate increases.
- However, the platform’s increasing opacity to researchers makes this difficult to say for certain. The Conversation sought comment from X about the research, but did not receive a reply before deadline. Without backstage access to the workings of the company, it is impossible to know for sure whether changes to its curation system are boosting its owner's posts.
- The findings raise the question of the extent to which Musk's influential social media platform is reinforcing its owner’s political agenda. Given he has previously tweaked X's algorithm to amplify the reach of his posts, it would be surprising if he were not tilting the platform in favour of Trump.
- The outgoing Trump administration’s Cabinet has been one of the wealthiest cabinets in US history of which Musk's businesses have extensive government contracts.
- Musk's actions have drawn focus towards governments to reconsider their approach to regulating the oligopolistic power over our information environment wielded by a handful of tech billionaires.
- Since Musk's purchase of X, it has become more congenial to figures on the right, including people who were previously banned for spreading harmful and false information.
- The myth of neutrality is what social media platforms such as X are playing. For too long, social media platforms have enjoyed immunity for the information they selectively inject into users' feeds.
- It’s time for governments to reconsider their approach to regulating the oligopolistic power over our information environment wielded by a handful of tech billionaires.
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