In the spring of 2022, Tesla founder and billionaire Elon Musk began buying up the social media service provider Twitter. He secretly acquired shares and then announced the purchase of the entire company. He claimed that he was acting out of concern for Twitter: It was no longer a forum for freedom of expression. In view of fake news and increasing right-wing extremism on social media, Twitter had begun blocking problematic addresses. This also affected the account of former President Donald Trump, who was blocked for insults and false claims. After Musk bought Twitter, Trump’s account was quickly reactivated. Musk portrayed himself as a fighter for freedom of expression. “The bird is freed,” he wrote on October 27, 2022, after the takeover of Twitter.
Twitter – a “bad” business
Critics suspect that Elon Musk’s interest in Twitter was due to a serious misjudgment of the company’s value and not the pretext of promoting freedom of speech. He had miscalculated with his offer of 44 billion US dollars for Twitter and subsequently tried to reverse the deal because the price seemed far too high. Despite all his efforts, Musk was forced by the courts to accept his offer. From today’s perspective, the purchase of Twitter was not financially profitable. Just one year later, the company’s value had more than halved and was only around 19 billion.
So Elon Musk had to bite the bullet and started to revamp Twitter. First, he renamed Twitter to “X”. He likes this letter because he sees it as his trademark. Then, in order to save money, he laid off a large part of his staff and thus gave up a large part of the review of opinions published on Twitter that had previously been carried out.
The EU criticises the consequences of the reduction of controls
Particularly controversial is the change in the verification of user accounts that Elon Musk introduced through a subscription model. Before his takeover, Twitter awarded white and blue checkmark symbols to politicians and public celebrities for security reasons if they had been verified by the company. At X, however, everyone receives such checkmarks when they take out a subscription.
According to the EU Commission, X is violating EU law and its Digital Services Act (DSA). This is because users can no longer be sure that the accounts marked with the blue ticks are authentic. According to “Spiegel”, 1 million tweets are said to have been published on 50,000 fake user accounts.
In addition, the EU Commission generally criticizes the loosening of controls, which Musk justifies with his campaign for unrestricted freedom of expression. According to the Digital Services Act, companies are obliged to take strict action against illegal content such as hate speech or false reports and conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk’s turn to the right
The criticism of X has also become so loud because Elon Musk himself has increasingly drifted to the right. His biographer Walter Isaacson sees an increasing zigzag course – with an occasional tendency towards right-wing extremist conspiracy theories of the American alt-right movement. Originally a supporter of Obama, Musk has turned politically more and more to the Republicans of Donald Trump, whom he now openly supports in his election campaign on X. The fact that he wants to support Trump financially with large sums of money has further angered his critics.
According to former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich – now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley – Musk is turning his enormous wealth into a vast source of unaccountable political power, lending support to Trump and other authoritarians around the world. And Trump reciprocated these advances by offering Musk a cabinet post in his administration – should he be elected.
Musk and Trump are already taking Kamala Harris, the new Democratic presidential candidate, to task. Trump is trying to dismantle her with insults – for example, when he rants: “I don’t have much respect for her. I don’t have much respect for her intelligence and I think she’ll be a bad president.” While he doesn’t believe that Kamala Harris knows the first thing about how to govern a country, he believes Elon Musk does. He wants to give him a top role in the new government because he’s a brilliant guy.
More and more users are separating from X
All these antics around Twitter and X have severely damaged the reputation of the news service since 2022. The irritations surrounding the replacement of Twitter by X already led to strong dissatisfaction among politicians and journalists at the time. After Musk’s takeover, many emphasized that they would withdraw from X. After a Report from the «Süddeutsche Zeitung» By the end of 2003, 47 well-known organizations in Germany had already said goodbye to X, including Doctors of the World, Fairtrade Germany, Kindernothilfe and Terre des Hommes. Only recently, X was banned in Brazil by the Supreme Court.
In Switzerland, one could read on the SRF website after the takeover: Since Musk bought the platform, the scientific community has been rethinking its relationship with Twitter. Since the end of 2023, many Zurich offices have also left X. A good 20 offices and directorates of the canton of Zurich had previously been present there, such as the State Archives.
This is associated with a general shrinkage in the number of X users since 2022. According to a Study by the renowned research company Edison Research X recorded a 30 percent decline in usage from 2023 to 2024. The German “Wirtschaftswoche” hints at the associated consequences: revenue from advertisements has fallen since the takeover of the platform. Elon Musk himself admitted this in a tweet in July 2023. The German “Spiegel” commented shaking his head: Since the disastrous Twitter takeover, Musk has been threatening to tear down his own monument. Musk himself is working hard on this. In November last year, for example, he praised a post criticized as anti-Semitic with the words “the actual truth”, which led to major advertising partners such as IBM pulling out.
In the political public, X remains a “must”
It is nevertheless unlikely that X will soon become history as a result of its erratic boss. Despite a few recent retractions that have attracted media attention, newspapers report almost daily with reference to the X intelligence service as a source. This is certainly also due to the global situation and affects, for example, reporting on the American election campaign or on the war in Gaza.
A Twitter/X account remains a must for many Swiss politicians and organizations. Political debates in Switzerland, such as the recent vote on occupational pensions, are also reflected on Twitter, with participants such as Cédric Wermuth, K-Tipp and the Young SVP Switzerland. In addition, the entire Swiss press, from Blick to Tages-Anzeiger and NZZ, is on Twitter. If politicians want to attract attention, a targeted post on X often helps.
Although many users wanted to move to alternative networks after Musk’s takeover, none of the alternatives such as Mastodon, Threads or Bluesky have developed into real competition for X. The usage figures for these services are too low to attract the kind of response that you get with an X account.
Twitter, or rather its successor X, has remained indispensable to this day for self-promotion and for distancing oneself from competing opinions. Despite the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories, X has long remained a key platform for public political communication. This has remained the case, although Elon Musk has increasingly become a right-wing political activist in recent months, and does not limit himself to a role as a moderator for freedom of expression on his platform.
Robert Reich criticizes Musk in the Guardian for seeing himself as an “advocate of absolute freedom of speech,” but accepting over 80 percent of the censorship calls of authoritarian governments. Two days before the Turkish elections, he blocked accounts that criticized President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The bird – the logo – of Twitter may have been freed by Musk, but instead of flying independently, it is now dependent on Elon Musk’s drip and flutters helplessly in its new cage.
Topic-related interests of the author
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