Has Twitter (now X) become more right-wing?

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FIRST HE DABBLED in digital funds. Then he revolutionised the electric-car business. After igniting a brand new house race, Elon Musk set out on a brand new problem. In 2022 he agreed to pay $44bn for Twitter (since renamed X), simply as tech shares began to slip. It has been a expensive journey for the serial entrepreneur: advertisers are retreating, and app downloads and consumer numbers look like falling. How has all that modified the location’s demography?

Leftist customers had threatened to give up the platform if Mr Musk took cost, amid considerations over his strategy to free speech. Our knowledge counsel they weren’t bluffing. Inside 24 hours of saying his intention to purchase Twitter in April 2022, the variety of accounts following Democrats within the Senate dropped by 0.2%. Accounts linked to Republicans, nevertheless, elevated by 0.8%. After the sale was accomplished six months later, we famous these traits had strengthened.

Such huge swings in follower numbers throughout many accounts normally point out an operation to wash up “bots”—automated accounts managed by software program. However the overwhelming majority of Republican accounts gained vital numbers of followers, which suggests a clean-up was not the trigger. Twitter responded to those sudden modifications in April 2023, to say that they have been pushed by the creation and deactivation of accounts. Our newest calculations present the sample has continued all through the remainder of 2023 (see charts).

Senate Democrats have misplaced a median of three% of their followers since October 2022. Republicans, in the meantime, have gained round 20% extra since then. Bernie Sanders, a left-wing impartial senator from Vermont, misplaced virtually 400,000 followers (or roughly 3% of his base), greater than another senator. Rand Paul, a conservative senator from Kentucky, gained greater than 1m followers, a rise of round 25%.

Regardless of the modifications, the location nonetheless leans closely Democratic. The celebration’s senators have 50% extra followers than their Republican counterparts (although that’s nicely under the 85% lead that they had in October 2022.)

Different indicators of how X’s political centre of gravity might have shifted are tougher to measure. Sensor Tower, an analytics firm, estimates that downloads of the app are down by 38% in contrast with a yr in the past, and that X might have misplaced round 15% of its month-to-month customers. (This may increasingly truly be all the way down to a purge of bots, slightly than a retreat of liberal customers.) The drop will do little to calm advertisers, who’re already spooked by an obvious improve in unsavoury content.

Mr Musk’s followers reckon that his strategy to social media delights X’s everyman-user. However the knowledge counsel his swashbuckling adventures are but to repay.■