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A rather dismal graphic showing the accounts that get the most engagement on the platform formerly known as Twitter went viral this week — ironically enough by way of getting a whole lot of engagement on said platform, X.
What was most dismal about this graphic, created and posted by the statistician and poker enthusiast Nate Silver, was not the quality of the statistics it used, though there were some questions about that (they came from an anonymous online dashboard; X’s head of product claimed they were “missing” half the network). Nor was it the rather questionable political categorisation of the various accounts (a “Republicans against Trump” account was apparently “left-leaning”, while state-controlled Russia Today was “neutral”). No, what was particularly bleak about this graphic was what it showed.
While the data might have been incomplete, it was broadly in line with other research into the platform, including a study published in Nature in February, as well as with many people’s suspicions. It’s not just a glitch in your algorithm: the account belonging to one Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, has by far the most reach on X. The other accounts with the most engagement are those of rightwing influencers whose feeds are full of offensive, rage-baiting slop.
The graphic provoked many impassioned outcries from outside Maga world. “It is utterly dispiriting how few of these bubbles are reliable sources of information,” posted University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. “This is discourse hell,” posted pro-Trump-turned-anti-Trump political scientist Richard Hanania.
They are right, of course. It is dispiriting, almost comically so, that X has become the utter incarnation of the “free-for-all hellscape” that Musk explicitly promised it would not become when he bought the platform in 2022. But the idea that we should think of the platform as somewhere to find “reliable sources of information” or as some kind of digital coffee house has always been, and is now more than ever, a fantasy. And Musk knows exactly what he is doing: providing propaganda to the baying masses, and of course using the platform to promote his various other companies.
All very well for me to say, you might respond, but what about those baying masses? Well it turns out that people are slightly less credulous than you might think. I don’t mean to suggest that a site like X has no misinformation problem (and it certainly has other very grave problems indeed, top among those being the way in which it stirs up various forms of hatred). But the level to which users trust what they find on platforms like this tends to be overstated, particularly in our artificially generated age. (I often find comments under videos on various platforms are dominated by claims that they are AI-generated, even when they’re not.)
While it’s true that trust in mainstream media has tanked in recent years, trust in social media is lower still. According to research from Pew last year, while 70 per cent of US adults trust local news networks and 56 per cent trust national ones, just 37 per cent trust the information they get on social media, a number that has stayed relatively stable for the past decade.
And even though young adults might be addicted to social media, we should not imagine that means they are more enamoured of it or more wide-eyed about it than anyone else. In a survey by The Harris Poll in 2024, half of 18-27-year-olds said they wished X had never been invented, while 47 per cent and 43 per cent said the same thing about TikTok and Snapchat respectively. That’s despite the fact that they were spending several hours per day on these platforms.
While X once functioned as a gateway to news sites, the fact it now punishes posts containing links in favour of context-free nonsense, as demonstrated by research from Nieman Labs this week, means that it functions more as a place to pick up vibes than anything more substantive.
And while a platform like Bluesky might contain less slop, less toxicity and more polite text-based conversation, we should not imagine that somewhere so ideologically homogenous can function as a serious forum for debate, outside of a very narrow range of opinion.
Our real problem is that we keep imagining that something that exists only in the online realm can replicate something in the physical realm. It cannot. A digital town square is a contradiction in terms. A person’s humanity cannot be reduced to their social media profile — not even Musk’s.
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