The evolution of Musk’s X network is complete; why Reddit is profitable; and niche Halloween costumes
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at Guardian US. Today in the newsletter: X’s final form, learnings from a packed week of earnings, and niche online Halloween costumes. Thank you for joining me.
With the US election, X’s transformation into Elon Musk’s weapon reaches its peak. He has succeeded in bending his social network to his will.
Last week, Musk deputized his followers to report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”, tweeting about and linking to a forum within X called the “election integrity community”. Experts told my colleague Johana Bhuiyan that the community, which has more than 50,000 members, resembled 2020’s Stop the Steal Facebook group with its conspiratorial tenor and morass of uncorrected misinformation.
Users posting on the self-contained feed quickly began pointing out what they deemed evidence of fraud and election interference.
Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC News system test, and a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the presidential election had been compromised. Among the tweets are attempts at doxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot-box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users seize on the posts and assume the often unsuspecting person being shown is guilty.
Musk is weaponizing X’s features. He’s bending the posts of others to his political will, curating the discussion into an alternative reality. He’s favoring the posts of some while hiding those of others: the Washington Post reported last week that, of the 100 top-tweeting congressional accounts, only Republicans are going viral. When he first bought Twitter, Musk deployed Twitter’s internal documents to reshape its public image with the Twitter Files. Then, when he endorsed Donald Trump, he made his own account his spear. He bombarded his followers with pro-Trump messages and a glitchy Trump interview on Twitter Spaces.
We’ve never seen a transformation like X’s: a billionaire unafraid of campaigning and naked partisanship bending a connective network used by tens of millions to his vision of reality. Elon Musk was the October surprise.
In the absence of financial success with his forced purchase, Musk has turned to politics to make his $44bn bet pay off. As my colleague Dan Milmo put it: “X’s continued influence as a news source and its role as an outlet for broadcasting its owner’s rightwing views to his 200 million-plus followers, means the benefit to the world’s richest person does not need to be measured in financial benchmarks alone.” Think of the restoration of Trump’s account and all Musk’s pro-Trump tweets as in-kind contributions, which Musk will cash in on during a Trump presidency.
When the election ends – will it ever end? – X’s value will decrease. It will become less important that the world’s richest man is yammering about voter fraud conspiracies. X’s traffic will probably fall off, as it does for media outlets that see surges of interest in political contests and corresponding craters. We will see the effects of Musk’s weaponization in the clear light of day.
