Musk has historic power to influence elections

Alan Rusbridger, The Independent

Think of it as a Venn diagram. Elon Musk is almost certainly the richest person in the world and controls a vast social media platform. The US president is probably the most powerful person in the world. Can the person with the biggest bucks help determine who gets to be the most powerful? And would we ever know? You may have been following Musk’s very public love-in with Donald Trump. No sooner had the former president picked himself up off the ground after a failed assassination attempt than Musk used his own platform – Twitter/X – to announce to its hundreds of millions of users that he was “fully” endorsing him.

There followed a string of conspiracy-minded posts, including the suggestion that the failure of the Secret Service to protect Trump could have been deliberate. The “legacy media” was, he announced, a “pure propaganda machine”. Unlike Twitter/X, which was the voice of the people. His words. He endorsed Trump-Vance (“Resounds with victory”). He once again denigrated legacy media. And then TheWall Street Journal reported that he would be giving around $45m (£35m) a month to a new pro-Trump super Pac — a political action committee which can channel unlimited sums of money to advocate for a particular candidate.

Musk says it’s not as much as $45m, and that the mysterious super Pac is not solely devoted to getting Trump back in the White House — even though Trump himself gleefully welcomed it at a rally. In any event, there is a very considerable devotion between Musk and Trump and we should all be very happy on their behalf.

Except this. Musk owns the main platform where politicians, journalists and audiences converge in America today. Yes, Facebook is 10 times the size, but Mark Zuckerberg has tired of the messiness of news and politics. Twitter/X is hugely important as a place of news, opinion, influence and impact. And one man controls it. We have, through recent history, had the Hearsts, Beaverbrooks and Northcliffes who sought to bend public opinion to their will. This week The New York Times even reported that the arch-propagandist Rupert Murdoch was trying to rejig his family arrangements so that — even after his death — his media companies would continue to blast his brand of conservativism at the public. A new kind of post-mortem politics.

But Musk potentially eclipses them all because of the sheer scale of Twitter/X — and because Musk could, if he wished, act covertly. No one need know. Algorithms are trade secrets, which means they are utterly opaque. We can guess what they’re doing, but we only know what’s happened if someone in the company leaks documents or talks to the press. Laws may in the future provide some pathways to allow regulators and academics to audit these algorithms and come up with methods to determine if they are neutral and fair, but that’s a slow process and doesn’t help us in situations like this, where Musk could conceivably slow/shut down left-wing voices on Twitter/X long enough to swing an election.

“We’ve had CEOs before pick a side and donate a bunch of money, but we’ve never had it happen at this scale, when the CEO also owns a speech platform where people are getting their information and news is breaking,” Katie Harbath, a tech policy consultant who previously ran election strategy for Facebook told Bloomberg.

But Musk would never do that, surely? This is the sort of conspiracy nonsense that Musk himself and his close friend David Sacks have recently been promoting on Twitter/X. Sacks, a tech entrepreneur like Musk, has been broadcasting pro-Trump fantasies to his nearly 1 million Twitter/X followers, including describing Kamala Harris’s candidacy as a “coup” and implying that she is the puppet of George Soros.

But consider the time when Musk had a tantrum when one of his own tweets about the American Superbowl got less engagement (9.1 million impressions) than one from President Biden (nearly 29 million impressions).

What happened next was revealed in February 2023 by Platformer, a digital magazine covering the tech industry. A hapless engineer explained to Musk why his tweets were not getting the reach he craved — and was duly fired on the spot. After the Superbowl, according to The Verge, Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers unless they could “build a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard of promotion to his tweets to the entire user base”.

Musk, having shattered so many records, is now redefining the word megalomaniac. The engineers fixed “the problem” by tweaking the code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets. “The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000,” reported The Verge, “a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.”

It’s called “a power user multiplier” and would explain why you may have seen quite a few tweets from Musk in your timeline, even if you don’t knowingly follow him. Musk himself has even joked about this, posting a meme in which one woman labelled “Elon’s tweets” forcibly feeds another woman labelled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back. This got 178 million impressions.

“Terrified of losing their jobs,” reported The Verge, “this is the system that Twitter engineers are now building.” In other words, we know Musk can, and will, use Twitter/X to boost the views he considers important (to take a random example, his own). We also know from research that platforms can be discreetly used to do good things in elections — for example, to boost turnout. What we don’t know is whether Musk’s fervent desire to see Trump in the White House would lead him to tweak his own algorithm. “We have less visibility into the platform because of changes in the API,” Harbath told me. Recently, she said, she had noticed posts from Sacks talking about Trump in her timeline and wondered why, since she doesn’t follow him.

“I don’t know if it’s because the algorithm knows that I like tech and politics and stuff like that. Or if it’s another reason. We have less visibility into how exactly Musk might actually separate what he’s doing as an individual versus what he can have the platform do.” Harbath’s mantra is “panic responsibly”. It may be time to begin.