For all of the attention paid to billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, there’s an aspect that is often overlooked: Not that many Americans use the social media platform.
Pew Research Center, which tracks use of social media platforms over time, estimated that less than a quarter of American adults used the platform in 2021 — beneath Facebook (nearly 7 in 10), Instagram (4 in 10) and about even with Snapchat (25 percent). It is a niche product, despite the company’s efforts, but one that nonetheless absorbs a lot of attention and commentary.
That’s significant because of what that niche is. Twitter is the domain of the news media, a place where journalists share work and interact far more than other platforms. And that means that it both gets more media attention than other platforms and is used for news consumption disproportionately relative to its competitors. That’s lumped into a broad sense that Twitter is an organ of America’s elites, a pejorative that is applied so that it overlaps with left-wing political views.
So when Musk bought the company, it wasn’t just a rich guy buying a platform. It was a guy whose interest in the platform was explicitly intertwined with his left-skeptical politics suddenly gaining control over what his fans view as the left’s newsroom.
This wasn’t Steve Ballmer buying the Los Angeles Clippers; it’s Donald Trump buying the New York Times.
Let’s first establish that Twitter does occupy a unique space in America’s social media universe. In addition to measure how often people use each platform, Pew conducted research at the end of 2020 evaluating where people got campaign and political news. While only 23 percent of adults use Twitter, 14 percent of those polled said they used it for campaign news. That’s a much narrower gap than other platforms; while more people said they used Facebook for news (25 percent), more than two-thirds of adults use Facebook.
Twitter is used as a place for news more than other platforms. And people who use Twitter, other Pew research found, have tended to be more engaged on news and politics — though recent internal analysis suggests that interest in news on the platform is waning.
But what we’re talking about here is perception. The sense that Twitter is a place for news and for the media. And, moreover, that it’s a place for left-leaning news and media.
Pew polling from 2021 shows wide divides in partisan perceptions of the platform. Democrats (and independents who tend to vote for Democrats, a group referred to as “leaners”) are more likely to say Twitter is good for democracy. Republicans (and Republican leaners) are more likely to say it’s bad. Democrats are also more likely to say they have trust in news and information posted on Twitter than are Republicans.
The first result is worth keeping in mind in the context of Musk’s purchase. He’s often framed Twitter as being essential to the health of the democratic (small D) conversation — implying that he sides with skeptics about how it functions at the moment, skeptics who tend to be on the right.
That perception stems in part from how Twitter responded to concerns about content on the platform that emerged around the time of the 2016 election. In addition to facing criticism for facilitating a (relatively toothless) effort by Russian actors to influence the American political conversation, the platform endured calls to limit abusive and often racist or bigoted posts. It implemented a system that would give those who’d violated its rules lower visibility.
This was quickly noticed. Conservatives who’d faced this minimization declared that this was a function not of their own behavior but of Twitter’s effort to silence political opponents. Twitter, based in the uber-liberal bastion of San Francisco, was turning the screws on the right out of vindictiveness, they argued. A term of art was generated: “shadow banning.”
It’s clear that some users, not exclusively on the right, were affected by the policy. And it is also true that Twitter’s standards for acceptable content is not necessarily in line with a political right that has increasingly framed its focus on combating increased acceptance of marginalized groups as a free-speech issue. What many on the right (including a former president) decry as out of control “wokeism” might be described by others as “reducing vitriolic or discriminatory attacks.” There are edge cases here, as there always are — but, again, we’re talking about perceptions.
In Pew’s polling, 6 in 10 Republican (and leaning) Twitter users said that limiting the visibility of certain posts — like obscuring election misinformation — was a “major problem.” The same percentage said that banning users entirely was a major problem. Overall, only 30 percent of Americans saw the former as a major problem and only a quarter viewed the latter that way.
Shortly before the 2020 election, Twitter (and Facebook) made a decision that crystallized a lot of this sentiment. When the New York Post reported that it had obtained a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, both social media platforms — wary of again amplifying material that might have been part of a Russian hacking effort — limited how the story could be shared. From that moment on, the perception was locked into place. Twitter wanted to help Democrats. This then became conflated with “the media,” which has at times been accused of similarly boxing out coverage of the laptop. (Here is a piece The Washington Post published at the time. And here is a more recent one assessing the contents of the hard drive said to be a duplicate of the laptop — once we were given a copy more than a year later.)
Into this steps Elon Musk. Here’s a guy saying what the right is saying: moderation goes too far, the platform is too hostile to voices from the right. Not only did Musk bid to buy the company, he energetically trolled Twitter on Twitter as he was doing so. And if there’s one thing that gets you attention and praise from the political right on Twitter, it’s deploying memes against the left or perceived left.
All of this occurs in the context of a long-standing and national campaign by voices on the right against a perceived leftist hegemony. This takes many forms, like Tucker Carlson’s rants about vaccines on Fox News. But the common theme is that there is a bulwark of inherently leftist centers of power in the media, academia and entertainment that drive how Americans talk and act. This narrative has long been useful to Republican officials; casting objective news coverage as bias blunts the force of critical coverage. (Trump elevated this particular approach to something of an art form.) But now it is expanded, drifting at times even into baffling, dangerous terrain like the QAnon movement.
But finally, at long last, here was Musk. Carving out a victory against the left — and on their most prized social media terrain. The right’s response to Musk’s taking over Twitter has been broad celebration and an assumption that the perceived political constraints that existed last week will be gone by next. (If not already.) But this isn’t just about tweeting about transgender people. It’s about cracking the elite hold on America.
Elon Musk is to technology what Trump was to politics. He is rich and has a fan base that is fervent to the point of being deafening. Like Trump, he has decided to take over a center of American power to reshape things to his liking.
It’s Jan. 20, 2017, in the Twitterverse. We’ll see what comes next.