US election: Has X changed the race for Trump?

- A previous study on the 2016 and 2020 elections found ‘Twitter lowered the Republican vote share’ in Trump’s last two White House bids

ISTANBUL

In his third time running for president, Donald Trump has a new supporter who many believe could prove to be a game-changer: Elon Musk.

Whether that turns out to be the case will be clear in a few days, but Musk’s backing has already given Trump an edge in a space that eluded him in his past two bids for the top office.

X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, appears to be disproportionately amplifying messages from Republican influencers and politicians, according to two recent investigations.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal found new X users were being shown large amounts of right-leaning political content, regardless of their level of interest in politics.

A separate report by The Washington Post found Republican politicians are much more likely to go viral on X, and many have seen a larger surge in followers over the past 15 months compared to their Democratic counterparts.

This represents a drastic shift from a 2023 joint paper that found “Twitter lowered the Republican vote share in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections,” particularly in terms of undecided voters.

The study found that “Twitter’s relatively liberal content may have persuaded voters with moderate views to vote against Donald Trump.”

“The most plausible explanation we have is really that Twitter is a predominantly liberal platform, or at least it was in 2020 and 2016,” Carlo Rasmus Schwarz, a co-author of the study ‘The Effect of Social Media on Elections: Evidence from the United States,’ told Anadolu.

“We consistently found that, if anything, counties or areas in the US with higher Twitter usage, were basically significantly more likely to vote for the Democratic Party instead of the Republicans.

“A doubling in Twitter usage was, more or less, associated with maybe like a 2% reduction in the Republican vote share.”

‘Clearly a big shift’

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X, many have spoken of a perceived right-wing shift in the platform’s content and user base.

“Musk’s takeover of Twitter, of course, is clearly a big shift,” said Schwarz, an assistant professor at Bocconi University in Italy.

He said preliminary evidence for the amount or type of content shifts, as well as policy changes, suggests “that right-wing users apparently felt encouraged to express their opinions, also to some extent hateful opinions.”

“This would be a factor that should benefit Trump’s side basically in the coming election,” said the researcher.

One way that is apparently happening is through X, as a recent NBC News investigation found that the platform’s “AI-powered trending section has promoted voter-fraud conspiracy theories and smears against Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Another trend has been the emergence of more “echo chambers,” particularly for the right-wing views held by Trump supporters, according to Schwarz.

“We have some evidence that really the algorithm can steer people in one direction or the other,” he said.

“In particular people with extreme ideologies really can make use of this and form these more and more detailed echo chambers, which then are to some extent exacerbated by the algorithm.”

However, Schwarz pointed out that there is also a possibility of this shift in content working against Trump in his bid to sway undecided voters, especially in the key swing states that could decide the race for the White House.

While the people most likely to be persuaded by social media are undecided voters, these are also “more moderate voters … who are turned away by like a lot of inflammatory rhetoric,” he explained.

“What could happen is that if there’s now too much inflammatory rhetoric on the platform, these independents are disengaging entirely, and thereby, are not exposed to whatever changed content is now on the platform,” he added.