Elon Musk is mounting a full-court press for the former President Donald Trump today, deploying his platform X to get out the vote for Trump, shout down the “legacy media” and predict a “landslide” for the GOP in Pennsylvania — giving Americans a look at what happens when a global social media platform throws its weight behind a single party and candidate. In the past 24 hours, X users have opened the app to immediately see a heroic-looking animated Trump striding across the top of the “trending” section as part of a #VotedForTrump campaign “Promoted by Team Trump.” Musk himself has used his 200-million-follower account to promote his pro-Trump podcast episode with Joe Rogan; post quasi-edgy QAnon-baiting memes promoting his brand of macho, retrofuturistic Trumpism; and boost accusations that Google and ChatGPT are favoring Vice President Kamala Harris. The platform temporarily suspended the account for “Swap Your Vote,” a project led by a progressive PAC that’s meant to connect Harris voters in deep blue states who want to swap votes with (presumably left-leaning) protest voters in swing states. As other social-media companies have taken pains to seem less political, Musk is tacking hard in the opposite direction. “What Elon Musk is doing with X seems far beyond any of the accusations Republicans have tossed at, say, Facebook and Google in the past,” said James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Musk is specifically using X to make a closing argument directly to the young male voters who he believes he can uniquely inspire to support Trump in his bid for another White House term. Shortly after noon today, he posted : “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.” The Rogan podcast was perhaps his most direct play yet to that demographic. The “Joe Rogan Experience” has an 80 percent male, 51 percent 18-to-34-year-old audience, and last night in a surprise move, Musk induced a Trump endorsement from the massively popular podcast host, who echoed Musk’s extensive conspiracy theories and claimed “if we don’t elect Trump, I think we will lose democracy in this country, we will lose the two-party system.” Because X runs on algorithms and user preferences, it can be hard to disentangle what Musk is promoting from what is merely “popular.” But The Wall Street Journal reported last week that X's algorithm favors political content, and specifically pro-Trump content. Musk himself spread false information about President Joe Biden’s administration hampering hurricane relief in October. And he has often pitched his regime at X as a counterbalance to how other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are operated, which in his mind favor Democrats. The effort has not always been smooth. Last night Musk canceled a planned digital town hall on X mere minutes after it started due to technical difficulties. The contrast between Musk/X and the other large social media platforms isn’t just one of moderation strategies. It’s one of how a platform should work, and who it should serve: At the directive of a charismatic leader like Musk toward his personal goals, or a more traditional, consensus-based model meant to create a sustainable international business? Most platforms pick the latter, but Musk has chosen the first option, seemingly at some cost: X has reportedly lost 80 percent of its value since Musk’s takeover. Musk’s political speech is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, as was the endorsement The New York Times gave Vice President Kamala Harris. And X, despite blistering debates in recent years over government’s role in social media moderation, is a private media platform (like Musk’s hated New York Times) not beholden to rules about fairness or equal time. But Musk’s entry into the campaign is far broader and potentially more disruptive than anything legacy media companies have done. The New York Times isn’t entering voters in a million-dollar “sweepstakes” for registering to vote, or standing up a (reportedly dubious) get-out-the-vote operation in key swing states, or committing tens of millions of dollars to its preferred candidate. By wielding a major social media platform as a partisan cudgel to target a non-traditional voter base, Musk is staying true to disruptive form — creating a new, strange, neither-fish-nor-fowl media and campaign-arm hybrid. Edward Foley, director of election law at Ohio State University, suggested that whether Musk’s use of X to boost the Trump campaign crosses the line from novelty into illegality depends on how closely the two have collaborated — and the ability of a “dysfunctional” Federal Election Commission to investigate and enforce the law. “If X were coordinating with the Trump campaign, that would be an illegal contribution under federal law,” Foley said. But even if a complaint were to be filed with the FEC, the commission “has three Republicans and three Democrats on it, so they often split three to three on anything significant and controversial … so there’s toothless enforcement of the relevant rules.” Even if the FEC sits on its hands, there could be political backlash: Social media companies have found themselves repeatedly on the hot seat in Washington for bias, safety and their role in allowing Russian meddling. Musk has placed a massive political and business bet, then, on the success of his X ownership in moving public opinion — if Trump wins re-election, Musk (in his mind) has proven that a society-wide, unserved thirst for his brand of red-meat, moderation-light public discourse has been suppressed by the liberal nanny state, requiring Promethean action to unleash it and put America to rights. If Trump loses … while his claim to Tucker Carlson that he’s “fucked” given a Democratic win might be an exaggeration, given his vast amount of already existing, nigh-indispensible government contracts, it’s easy to imagine a political backlash growing against explicit use of platforms to favor one candidate over another. Whether Musk gets his desired Trump restoration or four more years of Democratic governance, his use of X as an electoral laser pointer for his young, right-wing-curious acolytes is, unlike his geopolitical misadventures, without an easy historical comparison. The future of social media’s influence over American politics — at least this version of it — is already here.
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