Whether we like it or not
Andrew Prokop at Vox looks at the dynamics of Twitter since Musk took over and I think his analysis is correct.
Key takeaways
- Elon Musk’s changes at X (such as rolling back content moderation policies and creator payouts), plus progressives’ departure, have turned it into a platform where the right mainly argues with the extreme right.
- Now, even right-wingers like Christopher Rufo are perturbed by how popular bigotry and conspiracy theories are becoming on X, as feuds and controversies erupt there and shake the GOP.
- Meanwhile, the Trump administration remains obsessed with pandering to the online right, putting them out of touch with ordinary voters and endangering the multiracial MAGA 2.0 coalition.
He goes into the details of these bitter feuds and it’s very interesting. I follow it because even though I haven’t participated on X in years (I save my commentary for Blue Sky) I do read it and share videos here because it still provides information that I think is important. It’s a hellscape and nightmare fuel but I’ve never believed that putting your head in the sand is a good way to live in this world. But I see no reason to participate. Let them fight among themselves.
Prokop points out that this is happening largely because Musk himself made made changes that favor the right.
It turns out that once guardrails against bigotry and misinformation are removed, there’s a huge audience-side “demand” on the right for both.
“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”
You don’t say.
In all this lies the seeds for the potential destruction of the MAGA 2.0 coalition. Controversies over antisemitism are shaking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Overt bigotry and an obsession with online nonsense seem ill-suited to retaining the loyalty of the voters of color who backed Trump for the first time in 2024.
Prokop lays out the case for why the platform remains important and it’s mainly because political and media elites are still participating. But there’s more to it than that. It’s a window into the right that you just can’t get anywhere else.
He notes that before Musk, the progressive side of Twitter often went too far using twitter’s most powerful tool, the pile-on, resulting in infighting and empowerment of the extremes. (It arguably created much of the backlash against “woke” simply by elevating some of the more fringe ideas.)
Now the worm has turned and I would suggest that progressive politics were far less damaged by that than what is happening on he right simply because whatever excesses there were didn’t bleed into mainstream politics nearly as much. Nazis and masked secret police are just a little bit more threatening to real life than some college kids demanding that people put their pronouns on their social media feeds. The first is an extremely dangerous political shift that has some very profound historical echoes while the second is more of a consciousness raising exercise (and even something of a fad at times.) People are annoyed by woke. They are terrified of fascism.
The progressive exodus from Twitter combined with Musk’s heavy hand resulted in huge changes to the culture of the platform:
All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”
Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Oh heck. That’s quite a problem isn’t it? Not one that most of us who’ve been watching the right for a long time weren’t aware of, however. These attitudes have been present as long as I can remember and have been rising to the surface ever since Rush Limbaugh and newt Gingrich started pushing it out over 40 years ago. Where did they think this was going to lead?
X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that.
Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers.
[…]
This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are.
Prokop points to the Minnesota Somali story as an example of the right trying to unite around a liberal target and it’s always possible they can create enough noise to get Tim Walz’s scalp. But that won’t solve their problem The power struggle is real and it’s not going anywhere.
