Hello, all around the world Musk is considered the real winner of the US elections. He used X to influence the elections, they say.

I can confirm that X’s algorithm pushed the Musk messages so hard that it become irritating, but just before Musk started his “pro-Trump campaign” all the media, and most of the people, reported X as a “dead” social network. Before Musks acquisition, Twitter was mostly considered a small social. After Musk acquisition, a lot of the users left it, and when he started to do pro-Trump messages more people left it.

As I don’t live in the US my question is: do you think that X, which was considered pretty irrelevant before the elections, really changed the elections result? Or Trump would have won in any case? I don’t think some post on a small social can make such a difference, or at least I hope they cannot.

  • dadarobot
    1·
    11 days ago

    I never really used twitter much, so take this as you will. I’m not sure twitter was considered small. Many many celebrities, politicians, journalists, etc were on there. It was a platform where breaking news would happen regularly. It may be a uniquely US thing, but I considered it a very important platform for a while (even though i rarely used it myself). The “townsquare” metaphor i think was pretty accurate for the longest time. Unlike something like facebook where you mostly interact with your actual friends, or reddit where you interact with total strangers and hold on to some relative anonymity; twitter was where many notable celebs had public facing profiles where they would make announcements and have public conversations.

    I know many people who are “addicted to twitter” where they’re sick of the platform with its negativity and the rise of the alt right and low levels of censorship, yet continue to use it regularly.

    I wouldn’t say elon and twitter broadly influenced the election, but i think its reasonable to say that it had some effect in swaying public opinion.

    • kerbitsOP
      2·
      11 days ago

      Thanks for your opinion, I agree with you. For sure it had an important impact on the media, but IMO the multi-million donations to Trump’s campaign had a bigger impact. As you said, Twitter is now mostly used by right-wing people and I think they would have probably voted Trump anyway.

      I’m still using X, but if you don’t pay it’s now a read-only social network. You can write, but you will get almost zero visuals…