After buying Twitter, Elon Musk rebuilt it to his own specifications and preferences. This resulted in an environment we may gently call friendlier to the discussion and promotion of right-wing politics. The goal motivated his purchase and subsequent management and product decisions, and people who still use the platform will agree, in a narrow sense, that its character has changed. From the left: Elon Musk turned Twitter into 4chan for government officials and tech workers. From the right: Elon Musk killed Twitter, created X, and saved civilization.

This obvious and very public transformation has remained a subject of dispute for a few reasons. For one, it has been a gradual process, a slow accumulation of user migrations, changes to the platform’s policies and features, and the evolution of new dominant communities alongside older declining ones. This makes its progress hard to track. For another, as an environment for intra-elite communication, signaling, and coordination, it has been pretty resilient — at the very least, a lot of powerful people still produce newsworthy material there — meaning a lot of people who are unsympathetic or uninterested in its new direction have nonetheless found reasons to stick around. Everyone with exposure to X knows it has changed, but it’s harder to say how much and with what results.

At The Argument, Lakshya Jain brought some data to the discussion, conducting a large national survey segmented by respondents’ preferred online news sources. The results were pretty stark:

As an example, even though ICE’s net favorability rating is at -26 percentage points with all voters, it’s almost break-even with people who get their news from Twitter. Compare that to other social media platforms like........

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