announced head of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, describes himself as . He says he believes his critics label him as extreme right-wing because they see any position to their right as radical.
However, several of the billionaire’s positions are aligned with the more radicalized American right. He who claims that Jews encourage immigration to the US, has supported theories from – which falsely alleges that a child trafficking ring is operated by political elites in a Washington pizzeria – and .
These attitudes have an amplified impact because Musk is the owner of X (formerly) and guides it in an immoderate governance style, which exerts influence and control over the direction of the platform.
When he bought the company, in 2022, he stated that he believed the network had a . In the first meetings with executives from the then Twitter, as reported in the book “Limite de Caracteres” (recently released in Brazil), Musk showed more interest in bringing back Donald Trump and the right-wing satirical account The Babylon Bee than in dealing with operational or financial issues of the company.
Although he publicly stated his intention to promote political neutrality (“”, as he said at the time), actions and changes to the algorithm made a bias clear.
Musk did not block accounts in Brazil that spread hate speech, but he did so in Türkiye and India at the request of their governments. An analysis from the Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, the term cisgender became , reducing the reach of users who used it and limiting debates about gender identity.
This difference in treatment affects the visibility of political speeches. In order to measure this impact, the Sheet monitored the change in followers of 2,000 influencer and political accounts three years before the company changed ownership and two years after. He divided the accounts into three groups (left, center and right), according to the ideology expressed by the accounts that the profiles followed (a ).
The results show two clear phenomena. First, growth in follower numbers slowed dramatically across all ideological spectrums between 2022 and 2024. Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, there was median growth of 54%; it later dropped to just 3.48%. These numbers can be explained, in part, by the site’s loss of relevance. a 30% drop in its use between 2023 and 2024.
Second, the reduction in growth was uneven: right-wing accounts grew three times more than left-wing ones. Center accounts, the group to which Musk says he belongs, saw a slight drop in the number of followers.
Even before the acquisition, the right was already growing faster, but at a rate much closer to the others. Between 2019 and 2022, the right saw growth of 81%, greater than other groups. The left grew 71% and the center grew 22%.
Total followers across accounts in 2019 were split almost evenly between right and left, both at around 7.5 million. The center had 14 million. In 2024, the right and the center have similar numbers of followers, with approximately 17 million each, and the left lags behind, with around 13 million.
A recent analysis by the newspaper pointed to a similar trend, showing that publications by Republicans have had more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023 — more than double the views of posts by Democrats, which totaled 3.3 billion.
Despite claims of neutrality, Musk’s actions in controlling X show the fragility of this discourse. Like other platforms, X opposes traditional media outlets, which take explicit editorial positions, by justifying that they should not be responsible for the information that circulates on the site.
The role of editing, traditionally assumed implicitly by networks and historically explicitly by media outlets, now presents a reversal.
While the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post chose not to endorse candidates to preserve a possible image of journalistic neutrality, Elon Musk followed the investigation alongside Trump and, since his victory, has transformed his profile on X into a propaganda machine for the second Trumpist mandate.
Methodology:
Accounts from both versions of the Ideological GPS of Folha de and . The positions used for this analysis are those of 2022. For each comparison (2019 with 2022 and 2022 with 2024), the report only considered accounts present in both years and that had at least 500 followers.
