In 2011, political provocateur Andrew Breitbart warned a panel Fox News anchors that if America wasn’t careful, Donald Trump could become president one day. A year later, Breitbart died and his longtime associate, billionaire maid Steve Bannon, took over the right winger’s beloved website. He would use the site to help Trump do just that.

When Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, Trump was just beginning to consider running for president, encouraged by the conversations. he had with David Bossiethe president of Citizens United (the organization that succeeded sued the FEC to release dark money on the American political system). Bossie was also a friend of Bannonand Citizens United had received significant financial donations of Bannon’s associate, billionaire Bob Mercer. Indeed, Bannon met Trump for the first time in 2011, via Bossie. As Trump prepared to run for president, it would be partially funded by Mercer and coordinated by Bannon, Breitbart (who was also receive funding from Mercer) began producing a steady stream of right-wing content, as commentators would claimhelped pave the way for the MAGA movement.

Eventually, Breitbart’s own journalists denounced the site, describing it as the Los Angeles Times once put– as having sacrificed his “editorial independence and becoming Trump’s spokesperson”. Indeed, in 2016, the day after Trump’s electoral victory, Kurt Bardella, former Breitbart spokesperson, told reporters: “It will be the propaganda arm of the administration.” He added that the site’s mandate was to “create conflict, controversy and division” and that it would be used to support Trump. Ben Shapiro, himself now pro-Trump apologistonce claimed that Bannon had become Breitbart “in Trump’s personal Pravda”, a reference to the Soviet Union’s once-prominent propaganda publication.

Nearly ten years later, as Bannon said released from federal prison and Trump prepares to return to the White House, it appears that something very similar to what happened in 2016 has happened again.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. The deal was controversial, dramatic and, from the outside, largely impenetrable. Why was the richest man in the world, a man who already owned half a dozen companies— want to buy one of the biggest social media platforms in the world? Public speculation covered the whole range but I didn’t find any real answer. Shortly after the acquisition was completed, Musk pulled a majority of site staff and renamed it “X”. Since then he has grown more and more to the right and, in the run-up to the presidential election, allowed Musk to algorithmically promote a host of disjointed conspiracy theories and misinformation that proved ancillary to the Trump campaign’s message. The problem for Musk is that X is not profitable. The site seems to have no long-term business strategy except losing tons of money.

Yet in the context of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s Twitter deal finally seems to make some sense. Indeed, if one of the main objectives of the acquisition was to transform the platform into a global propaganda megaphone for the Trump campaign, then the other decisions made by Musk while managing the site (most of which defy all basic business logic) seem more reasonable. The gain was not the actual revenue of the platform (which fell by 80 percent since Musk took power) but a political victory for Trump, which would give Musk unprecedented access to major branches of the US government. This also explains Musk’s attitude increasingly dramatic anticsbecause they can be read as part of an overall propaganda effort. From a commercial point of view, informing advertisers about your site to “go fuck yourself” makes no sense. From the perspective of someone who wants to present themselves as an avatar of “free speech”, however (and thus win over a significant portion of the public to your political cause), it makes sense. In the days following Trump’s election victory, Musk’s personal information net worth increased by $20 billion.

Elon is such an idiot. He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all three branches of the federal government.

– Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) November 6, 2024

In 2016 as in 2024, the strategy of the right-wing political movement seems significantly similar. From this author’s perspective, the play is this: organized money, backed by right-wing billionaires, hijacks a media platform, whose ilk then proceeds to produce a deluge of far-right content. In many cases, the content appears designed to irritate particular segments of the electorate, thereby compelling them to support a preferred political candidate (in both cases, Donald Trump). In Breitbart’s case, the site apparently continued to produce information. In the case of propaganda shit in what was once considered the country digital “public commons”.

While there is no concrete evidence that Musk’s motivation for acquiring Twitter was to help Donald Trump get elected, there is no doubt that that is what Elon Musk did with the platform once he was running it.

Just like in 2016, the 2024 Trump campaign has relied on his ability to rile up his base with a mix of anger, resentment and paranoia. To this end, Musk’s racist and caricatured conspiracy theories related to immigration and the current administration. Trump has also leaned heavily on the alternative media ecosystem of podcasts and social media that are heavily focused on young men – a main constituency it helped him win. Many of these podcasts even received a cry the day after Trump’s victory earlier this week.

There is really only one conclusion to draw from the above, and that is that the political right is incredibly adept at leveraging media and technology to gain its electoral advantage. Indeed, many of the media strategies launched by Bannon during the 2016 Trump campaign appear to have been refined or significantly amplified by Musk during this election cycle.

It’s worth remembering that in 2016, Bannon’s Trump-related efforts also used his ties to Cambridge Analytica, a company formed by the SCL Group, a longtime defense contractor (with ties to the US Department of State) that specialized in psychological warfare.

It could be argued that Twitter, as a platform, offered Musk the combined powers of what Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica had previously offered Bannon: it functioned both as a media megaphone and as a means of collecting and centralizing data on the American public, both of which could then be used to complement an overall election strategy. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether any of this data was useful or not.) In 2016, Facebook was central to Bannon’s efforts. Cambridge Analytica collected data on segments of the US population of Facebook for the purposes of political advertisingin a notorious affair which ended with Congressional hearings. In Musk’s case, he bought a Facebook-like platform and privatized it, avoiding any sort of outside control.

Late last year, I argued that Twitter wasn’t much different under Musk than under Jack Dorsey. Of course, that was a long time ago and things are very different today. I still maintain that Twitter has never been a particularly good website and that the original version should not be glorified as an ideal public platform. At the same time, it’s clear that Musk took a site with significant guardrails, got rid of them, and began shaping the site in his own image (this image, apparently, is a petty asshole).

The real question is what Musk will do next. Bannon left Breitbart in 2018shortly after Trump arrived in the White House, and never looked back. It remains to be seen whether Musk will continue his tenure at X or if he will part ways with the platform. As a means of spreading messages at scale, X would clearly continue to be useful to Musk and other Trump acolytes during the next administration. That said, how can we continue to support a media operation that is hemorrhaging money? It is the financial situation of the site that will have to be addressed in the years to come if we want the propaganda to continue.