Despite falling revenue and dubious data on actual usage, Elon Musk’s network continues to drive far right politics and climate denialism. But should the platform be abandoned by accounts that could stem the tide?
Social media once had a running joke so prevalent it led to Facebook groups with names like ‘A Group For People To Announce They Are Leaving the Group’. The general consensus was, anyone who felt the need to publicly declare their intention to leave a community really just wanted a reaction from the community. This subject is no longer a laughing matter.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, for $44billion in cash, stock and debt, the network has fundamentally changed in nature, not just name. Playing on the fact the most controversial content drives more engagement and emotional responses, and the increasingly extreme political views of the new owner, who may or may not have been radicalised by his own social media outlet, what was once the community that challenged and even overthrew dictatorships during the Arab Spring has become a ‘mainstream’ mouthpiece of what some believe to be the beginning of a White House dictatorship built on bigotry and misinformation.
‘We do have a lot of evidence to suspect that X is turning more and more far-right by the day,’ Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who has studied X’s recommendation algorithm, recently told US broadcaster NBC News.
This is backed up by a number of other analyses, including work by the web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information centre Media Matters for America. Even Twitter’s own 2021 research revealed it was more likely to favour right wing political viewpoints than left, although the team could not determine why.
Less than four years on and so many advertisers walked away from X as it slid towards extremism Musk is taking legal action against some of the platform’s biggest former-clients. And some of the world’s most powerful brands and companies. The list of defendants includes Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest and Shell International. All of them stopped spending before the November re-election of US President Donald Trump and Musk’s appointment as a ‘special government employee’ – a reward for contributing millions to the returning premiere’s campaign fund. So who knows how long these firms will continue the boycott.
Easier to predict are the millions of X accounts that will never be used again, having been abandoned or closed in protest at the owner, his politics and the rhetoric now fuelling the network. Alongside countless personal profiles, swathes of organisations have also moved out, including left wing media, environmental and climate groups, charities,, research bodies, and think tanks. Their valuable energy could be better spent on more effective message-delivery systems elsewhere, and more importantly scrolling the news feed boosts the metrics on which X’s value is determined. More time on the app, more money for shareholders.
In some ways this exodus has worked. Musk recently posted on X that his company needed to change and was ‘barely breaking even’. US users alone fell by over 8% between October and mid-December 2024 following a one-fifth decline between November 2022, when Musk took over, and March 2024. And when Social Media Today ran numbers for the actual time spent on site per user last month, not even the opaque statistics published without wider context in company reports and press releases could hide the fact that minutes-per-day on the platform, per person, was falling.
Nevertheless, the likelihood of X coming close to failure is non-existent. Worse still, the apparent success of the Musk-Trump ‘special relationship’ has since galvanised other tech moguls to align with a White House that last week began deleting references to climate change from government-owned websites.
Meta, parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has already made headlines with measures to remove independent fact checkers, emboldening misinformation, including environmental science. And TikTok – once considered a threat to US national security – received an 11th hour reprieve from Trump on a ban first tabled by Trump, allowing enough time to organise the sale of US operations to an American-based buyer, with Musk linked to a possible purchase.
But as more and more social networks adopt a ‘if you can’t beat them’ attitude towards right wing extremism and climate denial, where does this leave the account holders who have voted with their feet once and opted to leave X for less problematic places? Online spaces that remain relatively neutral, if not left wing, liberal, and climate-concerned, aren’t just becoming less visible, they’re now accounting for far less numbers overall.
Bluesky, launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and now seen as one of the leading alternative social media platform for for example, has 27.44 million users. Mastodon claims around 975,000 active accounts each month, significantly down on the 2.5million peak in 2022. In contrast, around 2billion people use Facebook every day, with the same number logging into Instagram each month and 600million engaging with X.
As viewpoints that conflict with the White House agenda retreat into ‘safe space’ silos away from the rising far right, the echo chamber phenomenon will be amplified on all sides. For individuals, not being exposed to different opinions is dangerous, and this puts media organisations with accountability, non-profits running public service campaigns, and policymakers that need to cut through the noise between a rock and a hard place. A position that needs significantly more consideration before making a choice than it did just a few months ago.
Evidence is mounting that posts on X, Facebook and Instagram that do not support Trump and Musk’s agenda are actively demoted and hidden, but walking away altogether risks handing complete control of the most powerful communication networks on the planet to those who either don’t believe or don’t admit they believe in global warming, to name but one issue. In turn, this could reduce the backlash threat advertisers face when throwing money behind unethical platforms – if there’s nobody left to offend, there’s nobody left to complain.
The ‘vicious cycle’ that ensues when mainstream parties adopt or advocate for far right policies in an attempt to win votes back supports this theory. As Tarik Abou-Chadi, associate professor of European politics at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian, when centrist views disappear extremism is normalised, leading to the far right cannibalisation of more moderate politics.
Recent elections in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria, and polling in other European nations including France and the UK emphasise this. These countries have seen a prolonged shift towards hard line stances on immigration, among other issues, and today have either elected far right governments, or seem to be on a path towards that conclusion.
In the past two weeks we’ve seen a mind-boggling number of Executive Orders signed by Trump in a tactic is own advisors have termed ‘flooding the zone’. Simply put, this involves creating so much news at the same time the public and press become overwhelmed and must make quick decisions about what to follow up or report on. S0 the real question is not whether to leave X, or any other platform, but whether this approach could work in reverse to ensure climate science, equal rights, and free speech can still be seen sometimes.
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Image: Alexander Shatov via Unsplash