{"id":615157,"date":"2026-08-01T13:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T13:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/615157\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T13:00:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T13:00:27","slug":"how-musk-transformed-twitter-from-communal-town-square-to-right-wing-conspiracy-hub-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/615157\/","title":{"rendered":"How Musk transformed Twitter from communal town square to right-wing conspiracy hub \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a time before Elon Musk\u2019s<\/a> takeover of X, formerly Twitter<\/a>, when he seemed to get cold feet. <\/p>\n

The tech entrepreneur withdrew his $44 billion (\u20ac38 billion) bid for the platform in July 2022, claiming, among other things, the company had failed to supply adequate information on fake or spam accounts.<\/p>\n

The Economist magazine suggested Musk was experiencing \u201can epic case of buyer\u2019s remorse\u201d.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s board and shareholders, however, threatened legal action if he reneged on the deal, effectively strong-arming him into signing on the dotted line.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s bid valued the company at 7\u00bd times its forward sales (exceeding the valuation multiples of peers like Meta and Snapchat at the time), and gave investors a 38 per cent premium on the pre-bid closing stock price. <\/p>\n

Despite reservations about his plans for the company, which he signalled would include a watering down of content moderation, the offer was too good to refuse.<\/p>\n

\"\"What size does your pension actually need to be for a comfortable retirement?<\/p>\n

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey who initially described the Musk deal as the \u201csingular solution\u201d he trusted, before claiming \u201cit all went south\u201d under Musk, is reputed to have made $1 billion from the sale.<\/p>\n

Several former Twitter executives, including Dorsey\u2019s successor, Parag Agrawal, also enjoyed big payouts, but Agrawal was forced into legal battle over his severance terms when Musk initially refused to honour them.<\/p>\n

The biggest institutional investor, Vanguard Group, which had a 10.3 per cent stake, got a payout of roughly $4.5 billion.<\/p>\n

Since taking over, Musk has filleted the company of most of its staff. The headcount is down almost 80 per cent. The cull included the teams dedicated to policing the platform for hate speech and for authenticating humans over spam bots. <\/p>\n

Banned accounts have been reinstated, while divisive and misleading rhetoric is now frequently amplified. Bad actors can also pay for the \u201cverified\u201d blue ticks to extend their reach. <\/b><\/p>\n

During the recent Belfast riots,<\/a> the site amplified violent and anti-immigrant narratives. One analysis indicated there were 3,900 comments advocating lynchings and other crimes against immigrants.<\/p>\n

Free speech<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s former custodians had pledged to clampdown on this type of content, but Musk has steered the platform in an entirely different direction, downsizing the moderation function while selling it as a crusade in favour of free speech.<\/p>\n

Since taking charge, Musk has had a rocky relationship with advertisers – which used to generate about 90 per cent of revenue. <\/p>\n

Initially, they vacated the platform in response to content Musk himself was reposting and in response to the lack of moderation. This triggered a precipitous drop in revenue. Advertisers feared their ads would start appearing alongside neo-Nazi content or AI-generated pornography.<\/p>\n

At the low point in 2023, the decline in ad revenue saw the company\u2019s valuation fall to less than $10 billion – less than a quarter of the acquisition price.<\/p>\n

However, since Donald Trump\u2019s election victory and Musk\u2019s proximity to the US administration, big advertisers such as Disney and Apple have gradually returned, boosting the company\u2019s valuation. <\/p>\n

Last year, investors valued the platform at $44 billion in a secondary deal, but there are question marks over this as the company is now wrapped into Musk\u2019s Space X stable of companies, blurring individual valuations.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s registration statement for its June initial public offering this year indicated X generated $1.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2025. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0The rise and fall of Twitter: From a hub for democratic discourse to a bigoted, toxic sinkholeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

To put that in context, in its final four quarters as a public company from October 2021 to the end of September 2022, Twitter generated $4.7 billion in ad revenue. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you applied a modest 12 per cent annual growth rate (which is in line with the broader digital ad industry), Twitter\u2019s 2025 revenue would have been $6.6 billion,\u201d an industry insider said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo Elon cut costs by approximately 80 per cent … and today revenue is 73 per cent lower,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Of course, all these before-and-after musings perhaps miss the point. Musk\u2019s acquisition of X was never about money.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s richest men was buying a political engine, an unparalleled pitch on one of the world\u2019s premier news sites, to further his and Trump\u2019s political agenda. <\/p>\n

One of the first things he did was to reinstate the US president, who had been banned from the site in the wake of the 2021 US Capitol riots due to what the company at the time said was \u201cthe risk of further incitement of violence\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nobody can say for sure how much this helped Trump\u2019s election bid, but several analyses indicate X disproportionately amplified messages from Republican influencers and politicians in the lead up to the poll.<\/p>\n

X\u2019s AI-powered trending section now frequently amplifies Trump\u2019s favoured voter fraud conspiracies, further sowing distrust in the legitimacy of US elections.<\/p>\n

That may yet re-emerge as an issue if Trump loses big in the upcoming midterm elections, as polls suggest he will.<\/p>\n

Twitter had its faults but it didn\u2019t have an overt political agenda. Musk bought it and leveraged it as a tool for right-wing propaganda.<\/p>\n

Do Twitter\u2019s former board members and shareholders feel any kind of sellers\u2019 remorse? None of them are around to ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a time before Elon Musk\u2019s takeover of X, formerly Twitter, when he seemed to get cold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,356,1647,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,2772,65,66,67,879],"class_list":["post-615157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-donald-trump","tag-elon-musk","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-twitter","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews","tag-x"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117020383045552649","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}