Opinion: Elon Musk made X (Twitter) a freewheeling space. Here’s the proof.
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter and Tesla TSLA,
The CEO’s most notable changes to the social network have been small and cosmetic, including a logo change, a name change, and squeezing profits out of the familiar blue checkmark.
This is because large changes are difficult to measure. Many users who celebrated Twitter before Musk came along may now feel that X, formerly Twitter, is no longer the place for them, but they can’t explain why.
Some users say that X does not moderate content and does not pay attention to facts. Users are also reporting an increase in anti-Semitic and racist content, with many saying the social media platform has become “much more militant.”
We conducted a study to test whether this subjective assessment was based on evidence or simply anecdotal. We collected Twitter data before and after Musk’s acquisition was completed in October 2022 to test the hypothesis that the network is now less fact-based. Using data about post engagement, it’s possible to understand which voices are dominating the conversation and which are losing influence.
The data is clear. The face of X-Twitter is changing, and not for the better. X’s user base is now less interested in unbiased facts. Fact-checker accounts and accounts from unbiased news outlets receive 52% and 27% less interaction, respectively. Unreliable sources are getting more attention. For example, sites like The Joe Rogan Experience and Breitbart News increased user engagement by 22%.
“We used Twitter’s Academic Research API to scrape 16 months of tweets from thousands of media outlets. ”
Let’s look at our research in detail. In May 2023, we used Twitter’s Academic Research API to scrape 16 months of tweets from thousands of media outlets covering the period from January 1, 2022 to April 30, 2023 (subsequent API changes) This makes additional data collection difficult). ). We focused on media with the MediaBias/FactCheck (MBFC) label. MBFC classifies these into five political categories (minimal bias, left-bias, left-center bias, right-center bias, right-bias) and four scientific categories (pro-science, pro-science, right-bias). conspiracies and pseudoscience, satire, questionable sources). This will depend on the level of potential bias and misinformation.
To measure engagement, which is the best indicator of which stories are being amplified on the platform, we used the Twitter Count API endpoint to identify how often Twitter users added an @ or hashtag (#) to a single tweet. . For example, a tweet from fact-checking outlet Snopes can generate 247 replies, replies, and retweets each consisting of @ or #.
Of the 4,844 media outlets listed by MBFC, we surveyed all 3,852 media outlets that had Twitter accounts. In our analysis, we focus on comparing the first quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023, so the unusual election period in November 2022 cannot explain the results. All results reported below remain the same even if we compare the entire data before and after Musk.
We ensured that the number of posts from the average sample of these stores did not change over the study period, and we controlled for number of posts in our analyzes to ensure that they did not fully account for changes in engagement.
3 Key Takeaways
We highlight three key takeaways from our research that show how X-Twitter has fundamentally changed for its users following the Musk purchase. In Elon Musk’s X, users are much less interested in fact-checking accounts and much less interested in scientific accounts. They engage significantly more with extreme media sources and less with the least biased media outlets.
First, we noticed a significant decline in engagement with fact-checking and fact-checking sites such as Snopes, PolitiFact, and OpenSecrets.org. Prior to Musk’s acquisition in 2022, the average engagement on Fact Checker’s Twitter accounts was 76.9 per day per account (Q1 2022). A year later, in 2023, after the Musk acquisition, this figure fell 52% to 36.9 (Q1 2023). More than half of the 13 fact-checkers experienced a significant decrease in engagement levels, with eight seeing a statistically significant decrease. The number of fact-checker posts also decreased from 8.28 to 5.99 per account per day, but this does not fully account for the impact on post engagement.
In addition to fact-checkers, we also analyzed overall media engagement. Engagement across all 58 satire sites (e.g. The Onion) increased 32%, from an average of 62.7 per day (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023) to 82.6 per account. Comparing the same two quarters, engagement for all 199 conspiracy and pseudoscience accounts (such as ZeroHedge and DoctorOz.com) remained unchanged from 90.7 to 89.9. However, engagement decreased for all 176 science-related accounts, including Nature, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Engagement for these accounts decreased 13%, from an average of 119.9 per day per account in Q1 2022 to 104.7 per day in Q1 2023.
Finally, we found that when we group media outlets by political stance, users engage less with the most balanced sources. Engagement across all 216 right-wing media outlets (such as The Daily Wire and Daily Telegraph) increased from a daily average of 197.8 to 349.4 per account. This is a 77% increase, but no change in the 308 left-wing media outlets. (average maintained at 363.1)
At the same time, the data shows that engagement among what MBFC classifies as moderately right-biased outlets (496 outlets such as the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal) decreased 14%, from 175.1 to 151.4, and a moderate decrease of 833. Media outlets on the left (such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg News) fell 16%, from 318.1 to 266.5. Engagement with 1081 outlets classified as least biased (such as The Hill, Reuters, Sky News and The Economist) decreased by 27% from 110.4 to 80.1.
“One of the reasons people leave X is more extreme prejudice.”
The shift in conversation—increasing engagement with more extreme elements and declining engagement with fact-checkers and less biased media—may be one of the reasons people are leaving the platforms. A poll from April 2021, before Elon Musk, found that usage was higher among the youngest (42% of adults ages 18 to 29), with one in five U.S. adults, or 23%. I answered that I use Twitter. In September 2023, nearly a year after Musk acquired the platform, Variety reported that X-Twitter’s monthly active users had fallen 15% globally and 18% in the United States. People who are currently on Twitter are less likely to engage with unbiased media sources, and here are the facts: Before you buy Musk, check him out against people on Twitter.
X is in transition. That apocalypse may be triggered by advertisers pulling in money, but it’s more likely than not that it will never exist. As users change their relationships with the site, what was once a trusted public square is becoming closer to a hotbed of extremist conspiracies.
Gita Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Management at Columbia Business School and former co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Yu Ding is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
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