When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion back in 2022, we all sort of thought he did it so he could promote his own shitty memes and lame jokes on the social media site. Now, a few years later, he’s proven everybody right, but instead of those jokes and terrible memes, it’s right-wing MAGA propaganda and hate speech. The real rub? That shit from Musk is going to show up on your timeline whether you want it to or not.
If you’re a frequent X user like I unfortunately am, you’ve probably noticed Musk’s posts show up on your “For You” page even if you never interact with him or accounts similar to his. You’re not imagining things. Musk really is blasting his 20-or-so dumbass musings a day to just about everyone on X. I suppose his 203 million followers aren’t enough to make him feel seen.
Fortune decided to figure out if this was just some sort of weird anomaly or if Musk was really pushing his posts out to everyone who uses the app. Here’s what they did with 12 test accounts with different interests for five consecutive days in late October.:
Fortune conducted a multi-day experiment to gauge just how prevalent Musk really is on his social media platform. In approximately 90% of the sessions on X that Fortune conducted — through a dozen different test accounts — a post from Musk appeared at least once in the timeline, usually much more often.
None of the X accounts that Fortune created for the experiment followed Musk or actively engaged with his content. And yet within two sessions, all 12 of the test accounts had been exposed to Musk’s tweets in X’s algorithmically-powered “For You” feed.
The results seem to corroborate reports that Musk has continued to put his thumb on the algorithmic scale to amplify his own tweets, and they add important new details that show how the world’s richest person has managed to procure a popular communications platform and refashion it into a personal tool to influence public opinion. A spokesman for X did not respond to emails and texts seeking comment.
Among the Musk tweets that appeared in Fortune’s test account feeds was one falsely claiming “The Dems have imported massive numbers of illegals to swing states” in order to create “a one-party, deep blue socialist state.” There were several Musk posts promoting Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, as well as a recent rally in New York during which Musk spoke. Musk shared several anti-Harris advertisements, including one funded by Musk’s pro-Trump political action committee that refers to the Vice President using misogynistic vulgarities.
Political content, whether authored by Musk or other users, accounted for significant portions — in one case 83% — of the tweets that appeared in the feeds of the test accounts.
Even clicking “not interested in Elon Musk” (an option users could at one time select for all celebrities on Twitter but which now appears to be available only with respect to Musk and a handful of others) did not exorcize Musk from the feed. In fact, after one Fortune test account clicked the option to declare itself apathetic towards the tech billionaire, posts from Musk more than doubled.
We can’t escape Elon, folks. Fortune spoke with former Twitter employees who said there is effectively “no chance” that the “For You” feed would organically pull that many posts from just one person or one topic. It was supposedly designed to be “as neutral as possible” and pull content for a user based on their selected interests and location until the user engages with enough other content to steer the algorithm in a different direction.
It’s like there’s some sort of “manual override” happening here, as Fortune explains:
The other former employee noted that, in order to get so much of the same content in front of users, it’s almost certain that “a manual override” is occurring, injecting Musk and political content into the “For You” recommendation algorithm regardless of a user’s interests.
Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it X, has set about radically revamping the service, firing thousands of workers, closing offices, and bringing back scores of extreme accounts that had been banned. He said the changes, including the near elimination of content moderation teams working to keep user feeds free of offensive posts, was in order to bring “free speech” to a platform he claimed had been controlled by activist employees, the government and advertisers
In 2023, Musk reportedly fired an engineer who told him that user views on his tweets were declining. An 80-person team was tasked with getting to the bottom of the issue and fixing it, the Verge reported. The result was apparently a code change that ensured Musk’s tweets would not get flagged by the filters that typically sort tweets for different users of the service according to their interests.
Fortune says each account session on the 12 profiles lasted five minutes and passed by around 60 to 100 posts each time. During two-thirds of the sessions, Musk was one of the first three posts that appeared at the top of a user’s feed. Overall, he was by far the most common account across all feeds. Here’s what else Fortune found:
While eight of the 12 accounts showed no posts from Musk on the first day of usage, his posts appeared each subsequent day, and with increased frequency, despite the absence of engagement with Musk content, Fortune found.
An account with selected interests of travel, careers and science went from being served two posts by Musk in a single session, to 22 posts by Musk in a later session. Nearly all of the accounts, regardless of what they selected as topics of interest, experienced a similar trajectory, going from just a few Musk posts to many, sometimes dozens.
While Musk tweets about a variety of topics, including SpaceX, Tesla, and his other various businesses, Republican party rhetoric has become a mainstay. One Musk recent tweet that appeared in Fortune’s test accounts featured a meme purportedly criticizing a lack of voter identification requirements, despite most states requiring identification to vote in-person. And another of a meme regarding inflation, arguing its higher than President Joe Biden claims using a picture of Hunter Biden.
Across all of the accounts, day after day, politics was clearly the main subject, and overwhelmingly in-line with Musk’s own political views. Political content made up anywhere from 19% to 83% of the “For You” feed on the different accounts, despite 10 of the 12 accounts engaging with no such content. Of that political content, between 55% and 82% of it was obviously pro-Trump or obviously anti-Harris, Fortune’s analysis found. Out of roughly 4,500 X posts that Fortune logged, just 46 were obviously pro-Harris.
Twitter really is hell, but it’s a hell I’m very much a part of. Could I leave and join something like Bluesky? Sure, but I’m not a fucking dork, so I think I’ll stay put.
