Favoristime, algorithms, X has actually already abandoned itself to the Far Right due to the cultural war waged by its boss, Elon Musk. Cornered media, moderate or progressive thought are now invisibilized.
Elon Musk’s culture war
Although Elon Musk has justified his takeover of Twitter by defending freedom of expression (free speech), he has never hidden the fact that it was in fact an ideological battle against what he calls the “woke mind virus”. This tweet from Elon Musk, for example, was published while he was negotiating the takeover of Twitter. Musk associates the “woke mind virus” with the potential destruction of civilization and the failure of his multi-planetary humanity project:
But what is the “Woke Mind Virus”? This expression, which doesn’t correspond to any scientific concept, is associated in Elon Musk’s mind with fight against racism, sexism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, as evidenced by this tweet:
Since when are those fights an illness?
To understand, we have to adopt Elon Musk’s ideological filter. From the height of his 200M subscribers on X and after modifying X’s algorithm so that his word is omnipresent there, Elon Musk has never stopped promoting far-right ideologies and parties by relaying their speeches or promoting their accounts. He does this not only in the United States, as his unwavering support for Donald Trump has shown, but also in many other countries:
In Germany, Elon Musk supports the far-right ADF party, for example by intensively relaying the @SeibtNaomi account since June 2024. Here’s one of his first exchanges:
After dozens of interactions with this account, Elon Musk’s conclusion that “only the AfD can save Germany” couldn’t be clearer:
In Italy, Elon Musk is very close to self-declared post-fascist leader Giorgia Meloni, whose fight against immigration he joins:
His closeness to Meloni has even led him to deny a “romantic” relationship:
In the UK, Elon Musk has already intervened several times in political crises, such as when he called civil war “inevitable” over riots sparked by the country’s far right:
Elon Musk announced on December 18, 2024 that he would be willing to provide tens of millions of dollars in funding to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party, which was one of the main architects of the Brexit.
In general, Elon Musk hammers home the idea that Europe is heading for civil war if there isn’t firmer opposition to immigration:
So Elon Musk has gone to cultural war and armed himself with X to influence world opinion in the direction of far-right ideas.
X’s swing to the far right
When Twitter was acquired, the social network’s audience was pluralistic, with a short majority of progressive users. Since the arrival of Elon Musk, the changes introduced to X’s algorithmic, which manages the circulation of content, its new moderation policy favorable to extreme content and its own outspokenness, extreme right-wing ideas now flourish there more than on any other network of similar scale, and are given prominence by the network’s own infrastructure.
For example, The Wall Street Journal demonstrated that “new X users interested in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are inundated with political content” and their “For You” news feed is fed “with messages that lean toward Donald Trump and sow doubt about the integrity of the” November 5, 2024 presidential election. Furthermore, Elon Musk has created a special system to ensure that his messages are shown to you first in the News Feed, whether you follow him or not.
All these interventions in the very infrastructure of Twitter/X since Elon Musk’s takeover mean that far-right ideas now reign supreme on the network. This was his goal: to win the battle of opinion by getting his hands on the world’s leading network of information practitioners.
In France, the CNRS project Politoscope has documented the shift of the French political twittosphere to the far right between 2016 and 2022, which parallels the collapse of traditional parties [1]
Attempting to fight this system by staying on X amounts to a Don Quixote battle: on Twitter/X, Musk has already won simply because Twitter and its audience were for sale. Do you have to go to a far-right rally to be booed? Is it necessary to go to far-right media to serve, at best, as a punching bag, at worst as a useful idiot?
We could fight the far right on Twitter if the network were managed with pluralism, which was the case at first, but is no longer the case.
Public debate needs a clear and transparent system that allows all ideological currents to express themselves. Contributing to X is tantamount to strengthening the far right.
By leaving X, we hope it will be seen for what it is: a far-right social network, like Parler or Truth Social.
