Elon Musk’s real plan for Twitter: Helping overturn the 2024 election

Since buying Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk said he wants to turn the massively popular site into a free-speech platform and an “everything app” that would replace other social media, banking, and networking apps. But his re-platforming of right-wing bigots and conspiracy theorists may foreshadow a darker intention for 2024: helping overturn the national presidential election in Trump’s favor.

During the 2020 presidential election, Twitter outraged Republicans by doing three things: 1) Constantly flagging then-President Donald Trump’s lies about election rigging; 2) Removing mentions of a dubious news story about a laptop owned by the now-president’s son Hunter Biden; 3) Banning Trump for “risk of further incitement of violence” shortly after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.

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Meanwhile, inside the Capitol, 139 of 221 House Republicans (nearly 63%) and eight of 43 Senate Republicans (nearly 19%) went along with Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election rigging and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. If Republicans had a House majority on the day that Congress certified the 2020 election results, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said she doubts they would’ve voted to certify Biden’s win.

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Before and immediately after Biden’s win, several right-wing “free speech” Twitter knock-offs sprung into existence like Parler, Gab, Gttr, and, of course, Trump’s own venture Truth Social. Each one floundered for the same basic reason: It was no fun trolling the libs in a right-wing echo chamber.

Musk may have seen this as his golden opportunity: Instead of launching a brand-new, sure-to-fail right-wing “free speech” site where liberals would never go, he could simply buy Twitter and establish a right-wing playground where the libs already were.

To be fair, Twitter was already a dumpster fire before Musk purchased it. Queer people and social justice activists alike complained about its moderators unevenly enforcing its own hate speech and harassment policies, allowing both to proliferate on the site. However, Musk worsened this by firing Twitter’s content moderators soon after he purchased the site. Now, misinformation has begun superspreading on the site.

Another notable thing occurred after Musk bought the site: Advertisers began pulling out from the site over worries about how Musk would run it. Musk quickly blamed them for a “massive drop in revenue” and “trying to destroy free speech in America,” and he threatened to “thermonuclear name and shame” them for doing so.

Considering that advertisers are, by far, Twitter’s biggest source of revenue, threatening them was bad business. Shortly thereafter, Musk backtracked, saying, “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great,” and “We have to be tolerant of views we don’t agree with, but those views don’t need to be amplified.”

But now, over a year later, he has essentially done the same thing. After Musk espoused a racist and antisemitic “great replacement theory,” numerous big-name companies paused their ads on his site. He responded by telling any big-name companies who try “to blackmail me with advertising… go f**k yourself.” With this, Musk is essentially daring advertisers to show their support for right-wing misinformation and hate in the name of “free speech.” Thankfully, most companies haven’t bought into his bogus framing.

Musk has also since reinstated many of Twitter’s most notorious right-wing misinformers, including Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Alex Jones. Musk has also teamed up to help major right-wing players like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), toxic masculinity icon Andrew Tate, far-right activist Laura Loomer, and rabidly transphobic GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

As 2024 approaches, it seems ever-likely that the U.S. is in for a repeat of 2020, except perhaps with a greater likelihood that Republicans may succeed at their attempts to overturn the election for Trump. While Biden signed a 2022 “electoral count reform” law designed to help avoid a Congressional fiasco, election-denier Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) now controls the House and numerous state-level election officials in key states have either quit or been replaced by Republicans.

Under Musk’s control, X (formerly Twitter) is unlikely to flag, delete, or suppress disinformation from Trump and his right-wing followers. If Trump tries to claim massive fraud or mobilize his loyalists against election and government officials, it’ll be up to X’s paltry “Community Notes” feature to contradict the former president and cronies — essentially outsourcing the role of civic enforcement to X’s users.

Musk can watch the chaos go down and claim “free speech” while getting what he actually paid for: massive influence over the right-wing media sphere and favor amongst the right-wingers who he has helped empower.

The bright spot amongst the cloudy horizon is that the advertiser pushback against Musk shows a commercial disapproval for his brand of chaos. In the end, the companies that Musk has threatened may help hasten X’s demise much more quickly than Musk’s toxicity alone will.