Elon Musk and X - a push and pull between business and pluralism

Illustration shows Elon Musk Twitter account / Photo: Reuters

On April 14 2022, Elon Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter, now named X, that was later accepted for $44 billion on April 25.

After, there was “a notable and surprising surge in follower counts for Republican politicians on the platform," explains Veli Safak, Assistant Teaching Professor, Economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

Safak’s joint-research with Aniish Sridhar revealed Republican accounts gained 319,401 followers, while Democrat accounts lost 178,583 followers on April 26.

As the gap widened over the following days, he explains it led to the belief Twitter “had undisclosed private policies in its interactions with political accounts, raising questions about its neutrality.”

Musk’s motivations to acquire the platform also raised questions concerning how it would stand alongside his other prominent business interests like SpaceX, Tesla, NeuraLink, and Boring Company, explains Dawood Mamoon, a researcher at the World Economic Survey Expert Group.

In October after completing the acquisition, Safak says Musk shared a “trove of internal and confidential moderation and dissemination policies from Twitter,” among prominent journalists, in the so-called "Twitter files".

It allegedly exposed the platform's "use of secret shadow banning practices and revealed multiple instances of the Twitter moderation team being contacted by the Biden campaign and the FBI regarding political matters, including the Capitol attack and the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden, the son of the current US President,” explains Safak, adding Musk suggested Twitter acted “under orders from the government."

After the disclosure, he suggests X started to fulfil its commitment to being a neutral space that welcomes diverse viewpoints.

In May, Musk appeared to talk up the platform's potential to foster debate, writing “on X unlike the one-way street of broadcast, people are able to interact, critique and refute whatever is said," adding anything "misleading will get @CommunityNotes."