Nov 7, 2024, 6:27 PM UTC SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk onstage at the Roxain Theater on October 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh. Michael Swensen/Getty Images You might not like this. Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year. Gone are the warning labels that Twitter once used to flag false or misleading information. Musk replaced that system with a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes. He called it “the best source of truth on the internet.” Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work very well. When he wasn’t onstage, Elon Musk spent much of the Trump campaign’s October 27 Madison Square Garden rally standing alongside Melania Trump. Jabin Botsford/Washington Post via Getty Images So if your feed feels as though it’s especially full of right-wing voices and conspiracy theories, that’s because it probably is. It’s not exactly a coordinated effort by Musk’s lieutenants to push your views to the right. It’s just how X is designed these days. It’s way too soon to tell just how big a role X played in Trump’s reelection. We also don’t know what, if anything, Musk will do differently with the platform as he eyes some sort of role in the new administration. You can count on continuing to question everything you see on social media, though. “The problem will get worse because there are no guardrails in place right now,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All the trends are moving in the wrong direction.” Indeed, thanks to the apathy of social media platforms and the rise of AI, lying on the internet has never been easier. And if you’re on X, it’s part of the appeal. The right will continue to rule X Leading up to the election, opinions on the fate of X were grim. There were plenty of reports on the dangers of election misinformation on the platform or Musk’s broken promises about what X would do by now. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee argued that the platform was simply failing, losing users and relevance. That seems less likely now. Despite rumors of its demise, X is still quite big. X told advertisers as recently as September that it has over 570 million monthly active users, dwarfing right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, whose users are in the hundreds of thousands. It is also much bigger than platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which progressives fled to after Musk bought Twitter. Meanwhile, Meta recently said its Twitter-replacement platform, Threads, has 275 million monthly active users. A big difference between the two? Meta limits the amount of political content you see on Threads. It looks like people are either staying on X or flocking to it for unfiltered politics news. Political news on Twitter used to be marginal, where celebrities were the main draw. The celebrities have left, and now X is the most popular major social media platform for keeping up with politics, according to a Pew survey published in June. There has also been a major partisan shift. Democrats historically dominated political discussion on the platform, but X has become dominated by right-wing voices in just the last couple of years. Posts from Republicans are far more likely to go viral on X, and once-popular Democrat accounts have seen their audiences disintegrate, according to a recent Washington Post investigation. Elon Musk jumped onstage at an October 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and became a meme in the process. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Republicans have also changed their minds about the platform’s impact on democracy. While Twitter was once framed as the platform that censored conservative voices, X has become the right’s favorite place for freedom. Only 17 percent of Republicans thought Twitter was good for democracy in 2021, but 53 percent said X was good for democracy in 2024, according to the Pew study. “Democratic users are much more likely to think people getting harassed is a major problem on the platform, and on the flip side, Republicans who post about politics are especially likely to do so because their views feel welcome there,” Colleen McClain, one of the authors of the Pew study, told me this week. McClain added that “in recent years, we haven’t seen any mass exodus or flocking to or from X in our data, either overall or by party.” None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve spent any time on X. But the partisan split took on new dimensions leading up to this year’s election, if only because the Republicans who felt like their voices were heard on X also felt heard at the ballot box.