Sydney, 1 Nov

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

I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.

Musk’s efforts to influence who wins next week’s US presidential election have continued. For example, over the past three months, he has donated more than US$100 million to a political action committee called America PAC that’s promoting Trump.

But our new research (currently available in preprint form) indicates Musk may be wielding influence in other more subtle ways as well. However, the platform’s increasing opacity to researchers makes this difficult to say for certain.

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

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

Musk has history when it comes to tweaking X’s algorithms so his own content reaches more people.

Last year, he reportedly mobilised a team of around 80 engineers to algorithmically boost his posts. -PTI