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Elon Musk and His War on Mainstream Media [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-25

Elon Musk is reported to have spent about $250 million getting Donald Trump elected in 2024, but he and a consortium spent $44 billion buying Twitter in 2022 , a far greater sum of money. This is of concern particularly when you consider the above Gallup polls showing declining trust in the mainstream media. Republicans in particular have been shorn from mainstream media, instead often preferring influencers on social media. Musk openly and regularly admits on Twitter that he aims to displace the “legacy” media., e.g. here or here . Indeed recently in conspiratorial tones he’s been accusing governments of funding the legacy media and even trying to game Twitter’s “Community Notes” system.

So what does Musk offer in alternatives? One example is this account that Mario Nawfal was funded by a far right Putin supporting political party in Romania. The Nawfal account is sycophantic towards Musk, telling him what he wants to hear, and also pushing Kremlin propaganda. How is this an improvement on the mainstream media? Similarly, he boosts politicians who’ve been convicted of making Nazi salutes , and a whole plethora of scammy anonymous accounts, e.g.Whole Mars Catalog , Autism Capital , DogeDesigner , @amuse Insurrection Barbie , Rothmus or Catturd . Musk also positively engages with a lot of discredited low quality influencers/journalists, e.g. Laura Loomer , Ian Miles Cheong and Jack Posobiec . These are all low information, low quality accounts that are way below the standard of the traditional mainstream media, Musk is purposefully amplifying mis/disinformation.

In my native Ireland, Musk supports fringe far right accounts (Irish Times story here , paywall free here ). Musk previously backed Conor McGregor to become President of Ireland ( Daily Mail , apologies for the source). Conor McGregor is not popular in Ireland and has since been found guilty of rape at a civil trial. The Irish influencers that Musk boosts are low quality but nonetheless Musk has captured a lot of young male interest and he now is their source of truth.

Of course Elon Musk’s $44billion war on the mainstream media isn’t the only reason trust/usage of the mainstream media is declining. Many people get their information fix from other low quality sources such as Joe Rogan or TikTok influencers. However, Twitter has proved extraordinarily effective at spreading conspiracy theories in the past, and countries such as China & Russia have used networks of tens of thousands of inauthentic accounts to spread their propaganda. Twitter making API access very expensive has inhibited civil society organisations & independent researchers from researching Twitter and exposing fraud as they used to, example here . This study released in February 2025 shows the far right are using misinformation as a tactic on Twitter.

Some alternatives to Twitter such Bluesky or Threads have appeared but none of them yet have critical momentum, so for now Twitter rules as the microblogging service of choice. Musk is accelerating the displacement of the mainstream media by low quality right/far right accounts. Of course, we can soon expect AI to transform Twitter and likely give Musk even more power.

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