OPINION | Crossed Wires: Media Ownership and the Death of Truth on X

The Musk version of free speech rewards harmful content and its creators—no matter the cost to truth and healthy public discourse.

Elon Musk, owner of X. Image courtesy of The New Yorker.

In April of 2022, Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter.

In a letter to Bret Taylor, who was at that time the head of Twitter’s Board of Directors, Musk called Twitter “the platform for free speech around the globe.”

“Twitter has great potential,” he wrote. “I will unlock it.”

The actual purchase of the platform was not so simple. It took six months and several legal battles for Twitter to finally change hands.

And yet, in October of 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of the platform. He marked the occasion with a Twitter post (As a side note, does anyone else wonder what he did with the sink afterwards? No, just me? Okay, fine). 

Nine months later, Musk rebranded Twitter to X. The name change made waves, but by then Musk had already remade X in his image.

The X account of Elon Musk. Image courtesy of Arab News.

Before the rebrand, Musk conducted a broad overhaul of X policy. This included the ways in which X would moderate content: He favored automated moderators over manual content reviews, welcomed back accounts that had been formerly banned or suspended, and did away with rules on hate speech and disinformation (Among the numerous policies eliminated were the platform’s rules on COVID-19 disinformation).

If you used X in 2023, you likely noticed the change. Its effects were swift and stark—hate speech was on the rise. The number of posts made containing racial slurs more than doubled. Antisemitic posts went up by 61%.

And it didn’t end there.

Accounts associated with both foreign and domestic terrorist groups, which would have been banned in the past, were back in full force. Among them were accounts promoting QAnon, a far-right political conspiracy. Research conducted by the nonprofit Media Matters found that nearly 50% of all accounts tweeting about QAnon were created after Musk purchased the platform.

Peddlers of the conspiracy not only had their accounts reinstated, but verified. Launched by Musk in November of 2022, Twitter Blue—rebranded as X Premium—allowed for anyone with $8 to spare the ability to pose as legitimate and trustworthy. It even came complete with a blue check mark to boot.

Meanwhile, Musk claimed that hate speech was actually on a decline. His post contained neither the data referenced nor the method that had been used to measure the supposed drop in hate speech.

While hate speech may not have decreased, the number of X users did. Between 2022 and 2023, the platform lost over 14 million accounts. Those who stuck around began to wonder: What does free speech mean to the richest man in the world? 

In 2011, when Twitter’s CEO was a man named Dick Costolo, the platform played a valuable role in the Arab Spring movement taking place in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East.

“[We use] Twitter to coordinate,” tweeted one Arab Spring activist from Egypt.

That same year, Costolo defiantly referred to Twitter as “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” in response to U.S. officials issuing subpoenas, requesting the account details of WikiLeaks.

Unlike Costolo, Musk has shown little concern for the freedom of speech as it applies to global politics. The Musk version of free speech starts and ends with a policy X refers to as “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach.”

According to the policy, X prefers to limit the reach of tweets rather than delete them altogether. The policy “allows us to move beyond the binary of ‘leave up versus take down,’” says X.

In effect, Freedom of Speech, Not Reach has proven itself entirely unsuccessful. Harmful content continues to spread, and is often boosted by the platform itself, thanks to X Premium.

Likewise, the Creator Revenue Sharing program—launched by Musk in July of 2023, it allows users with X Premium and over 500 followers to collect a share of the ad revenue generated by X—has allowed for (and even encouraged) the spread of disinformation by allowing users to monetize it.

According to research conducted by Media Matters, far-right X users had already collectively earned tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue by July of 2023. Several of those users were formerly banned from the platform and had been reinstated by Elon Musk. 

In a post, Andrew Tate—a far-right social media influencer who has been accused of rape and human trafficking—revealed that he earned more than $20,300 in ad revenue thanks to the Creator Revenue Sharing program. Tate was banned from Twitter two months before Musk completed his purchase of the platform, and had his account reinstated by Musk in November of 2022.

The Musk version of free speech rewards harmful content and its creators—no matter the cost to truth and healthy public discourse. This problem is not unique to X: Over thirty years earlier, Noam Chomsky outlined the model employed by Musk in his book, Manufacturing Consent.

Noam Chomsky at an event in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Image courtesy of Truthout.

Known as the propaganda model, it aims to explain how mass media—traditionally newspapers, but the model applies to X as well—serves the interests of powerful elites. The model employs five filters—ownership, business model, news sources, “flak,” and anti-communist interests—leaving only “cleansed residue fit to print,” in the words of Chomsky. 

According to Chomsky’s model, the media doesn’t need to be manually censored. It will filter and censor itself, in order to align with the interests of those who own and fund it. Platforms like X exemplify how the propaganda model warps public discourse and results in the spread of disinformation. 

A similar phenomenon can be seen at The Washington Post, owned by the founder and former CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. In February of 2025, Bezos shared a post on X that detailed the future of The Post’s opinion section.

“We will write every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Bezos’ decision to limit the opinion section of his newspaper directly reflects Chomsky’s model of self-censorship. It not only affects how the media functions, but how the public thinks.

Thankfully, “the platform for free speech around the globe,” can’t be so easily swayed.

In a poll conducted by Pew Research Center, a median of 57% of people say social media has been more of a good thing for democracy, with 35% saying it has been a bad thing. The United States, however, is a clear outlier: Just 34% of U.S. adults think social media has been good for democracy, while 64% say it has been a bad thing.

Furthermore, 79% of people in the U.S. believe that access to social media has made people more divided in their political opinions, the highest percentage among the 19 countries polled by Pew Research Center.

Like Musk, Bezos has previously come under fire for his ownership of The Post (seeing as he is businessman and not a journalist). Yet, the newspaper still reaches millions of people daily.

Likewise, X sported more than 335 million active users in 2024. 

If Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent warned us about the dangers of elite media ownership, Musk’s X is the sequel nobody asked for—now with fewer disinformation policies and more racial slurs. 

This isn’t about one billionaire with too much money and not enough hobbies. It’s about what happens when one of the largest platforms for public discourse is bought and sold to the highest—reluctant—bidder. Especially when that individual is employed by the United States government.