On July 13, shortly after Donald Trump was targeted by an assassination attempt, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of tweeted to his more than 200 million followers:

I fully support President Trump and hope for his speedy recovery.

Musk’s efforts to influence the winner of next week’s US presidential election continue. For example, in the last three months he donated more than 100 million US dollars to a political action committee called America PAC that promotes Trump.

But our new research (currently available in preprint form) indicates that Musk may also exert his influence in other, more subtle ways. However, the increasing opacity of the platform for researchers makes this information difficult to state with certainty.

Shortly after Musk endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign, there was a statistically anomalous increase in engagement with his X account. Suddenly, his posts received a much higher number of views, retweets, and likes compared to other prominent political accounts on the platform.

This raises suspicions about whether Musk changed the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts ahead of the US presidential election. It also demonstrates the problems with how social media platforms like X are currently regulated around the world.

Not the first time

Musk has a history of tweaking X’s algorithms so that his own content reaches more people.

Last year, he would have been mobilized a team of around 80 engineers to algorithmically boost its posts. This happened after his tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl was trumped by a similar tweet from President Joe Biden. Musk appeared to confirm that this had happened, post a photo depicting a woman labeled “Elon’s Tweets” force-feeding another woman labeled “Twitter”.

To see if Musk did it again in the run-up to the US election, we compared Musk’s engagement metrics – such as the number of views, retweets and likes – with a set of other prominent political accounts on the platform social media. The data covers the period from January 1, 2024 to October 25, 2024.

Other political narratives served as a basis for comparison, including those from right-wing commentators Jack Posobiec, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. Our study also examined narratives from the other end of the political spectrum, including those from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. , US Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A sudden and significant increase

Since July, engagement with Musk’s X account has seen a sudden and significant increase.

The number of views for his posts increased by 138%, retweets by 238% and likes by 186%.

In contrast, other prominent political accounts on X saw more moderate increases: 57% in views, 152% in retweets, and 130% in likes.

This suggests that while engagement increased for all accounts after July, Musk’s metrics saw a particularly large increase, particularly in retweets and likes.

The study further found that since July, other conservative and right-wing X accounts performed better in post visibility compared to progressive and left-wing accounts.

The Conversation sought comment from X on the research, but did not receive a response by deadline.

Without behind-the-scenes access to how the company operates, it’s impossible to know for sure whether changes to its curation system are boosting its owner’s posts. The platform has limited the access it provides to researchers since Musk took over. This means that there are restrictions on the amount of data we were able to collect for this study.

However, the Washington Post recently discovered that tweets from Republicans are much more likely to go viral, receiving billions more views than those from Democrats. In the same way, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that new users of the platform “are being plastered with political content” that disproportionately favors Trump.

Since Musk purchased the platform, it has become more popular with right-wing figures, including people who were previously banned for spreading harmful and false information.

The myth of neutrality

The findings raise the question of how much Elon Musk’s influential social media platform reinforces its owner’s political agenda.

Musk, whose companies have numerous government contracts, has made a public and financial spectacle of his wholehearted support for Trump. Billionaire Tech Mogul Reportedly Trump’s second financial donor. He also promoted Trump in a lame live interview on X and authored a stream of tweets promoting the Trump campaign.

Musk also distributes $1 million per day to selected registered voters. This plan (which met questions about its legality) is apparently aimed at boosting voter registration among supporters in swing states.

Musk’s actions torpedoed the fantasy that social media platforms such as X would be neutral. Given that he has already tweakedthe path to prosperity“.

For too long, social media platforms have enjoyed immunity for the information they selectively inject into users’ feeds. It is time for governments to reconsider their approach to regulating the oligopolistic power exercised by a handful of tech billionaires over our information environment.