Elon Musk is now king of the MAGA media universe

Elon Musk is now unquestionably the king of MAGA media.

Tech journalist Charlie Warzel once named it "the new media Upside Down", riffing on Stranger Things. Sean Illing at Vox referred to it as "the fantasy-industrial complex". Wikipedia simply calls it the "right-wing alternative media".

To Musk, a born-again MAGA crusader who has spent the last two years reshaping one of the world’s major social networks in his image, this parallel universe of algorithm-aided disinformation is simply "citizen journalism" — even if his description does sound a lot like traditional journalism.

And after Donald Trump’s victory this week, the MAGA media universe might just be the new mainstream media.

"The reality of this election was plain to see on X, while most legacy media lied relentlessly to the public," the mega-billionaire told his 203m followers on Wednesday morning. "You are the media now."

Tuesday’s result was a testament to the enduring power of that ecosystem. While "legacy" newspapers and TV networks reported on Donald Trump’s criminal convictions and alleged plots to overthrow the 2020 election, his cult of personality has persisted through a whole other world of partisan news outlets, merchandise-hawking online influencers, and outright cults dedicated to his glory.

Yet since Trump himself was booted from mainstream social networks in January 2021, there’s been no one at the apex of this pyramid. That is, until this year.

"It was Trump, and now it’s Musk," says Mike Rothschild, a journalist and author of the 2022 book The Storm Is Upon Us about the QAnon conspiracy movement. "Musk really has taken over the role of chief s***poster, and he loves it.”

Now, with Trump on his way to the White House, Musk’s $44bn purchase of Twitter two years ago – and, experts allege, his efforts to transform it into a pro-Trump propaganda machine – give him enormous influence over the movement.

"What this does is puts him basically at the elbow of the president-elect of the United States," says Rothschild. "It puts him at the levers of power with a president who is kind of beholden to him, at least for now."

The Independent has asked Elon Musk and X for comment.

‘A one stop shop for conspiracy theories’

Long before the 2024 election, conservative journalists and activists had spent years building their own media ecosystem. Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of the TV airwaves created partisan networks like Fox News, and new generations have followed their example in the online age.

"We’ve really created parallel institutions,” conservative media entrepreneur Mike Cernovich told BuzzFeed News in 2017. “Trump supporters didn’t think they were being treated fairly or accurately by the media... and so we created the answer."

Meanwhile, as a tech reporter for the UK’s Daily Telegraph, I watched conspiracist communities and far right extremists flourish on big social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, aided by the companies’ own algorithmic recommendation engines.

When the world plunged into the Covid pandemic in 2020, these currents became a whirlpool. Diverse extremist communities coalesced under the banner of QAnon, eventually morphing into the Stop the Steal movement that stormed the US Capitol in 2021.

Trump was a conduit and an amplifier for these energies, noticing false claims that had filtered up through the network from fringe spaces such as 8chan and Telegram and then using his presidential megaphone to spread them to the whole movement.

In the early years of Trump’s rise, people had sometimes talked about "fake news" or "disinformation" in isolation, as if it was the cause of what was happening. Now it was clear that disinformation was just the symptom, the product, of a wholesale cultural split; that America had a problem with disinformation the same way a warzone has a problem with bullets.

In the aftermath of Jan 6, most attempts to create a new online hub for the Trumpist right failed to gain momentum – including Trump’s own effort, Truth Social. What no one predicted then was that someone with enough money and motivation could simply take over an existing social network.

But then Musk bought Twitter in early 2022. Since burning down "Twitter 1.0", Musk has drastically reduced X’s content moderation apparatus, weakened safeguards against harassment, relaxed hate speech rules, effectively abolished Twitter’s old identity verification system, and declared a general amnesty for previously banned far-right accounts.

According to reports, the social platform has also systematically failed to enforce its own rules against the far right, repeatedly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to buy adverts, get verified as "official organizations", or earn money through its revenue sharing program.

And while X’s own revenue appears to have collapsed, the company has at least succeeded in many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s dream: cutting out middlemen and aggregating what was once a multi-platform supply chain.

"It’s really a one stop shop for conspiracy theories now," says Rothschild (who is, incidentally, no relation to the famous Rothschild banking family that perennially fascinates conspiracy theorists).

"It used to be that you found something on 4chan, and you’d post it on Reddit. Then it would jump to a small Twitter account, then to the bigger accounts, and then up to Trump, and Trump would get it on Fox News. Now there doesn’t need to be any of that."

‘The legacy media pushed a completely false reality’

Ultimately, it might be Musk’s own behavior that has had the biggest impact. With Trump’s own social media statements still relatively marginal compared to during his first term, it’s Musk’s seemingly compulsive tweeting that has filled the void.

Indeed, tweaking X’s algorithms to promote his own posts is one key way Musk has been accused of slanting the service towards Trump. At this point, it seems impossible to separate his personal opinions, or his own penchant for lurid hoaxes and borderline incitement to violence, from X’s editorial policy.

"Today, Musk has transformed X into a political operation designed to get Trump elected at all costs. That means not only hosting election misinformation, but actively promoting it," wrote tech journalist Casey Newton on Monday.

We don’t know yet how much this really mattered in deciding the election result. But given how many traditional media, polling and political institutions completely misjudged what would happen, many progressives are treating this as a five alarm fire.

"The Biden/Harris camp built the best phone banking and door knocking operation in history and failed to turn out 15m Biden 2020 voters," wrote Ari Drennen of the left-wing media monitor Media Matters for America, which is being sued by X over its criticism of the company.

"Republicans built an echo chamber and ignored legacy media. Democrats need to invest in content creators and pray that it’s not too late."

In fact, writing for The Independent on Thursday, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger claimed that Musk’s alleged backchannel discussions with Vladimir Putin and alt-media influence, might make him a greater danger to the United States than the president-elect himself.

Musk naturally sees the moment differently. “For anyone… who finds this result shocking, they should reconsider where they get their information,” he said on Wednesday night. “This trend was obvious on X for months, but almost all the legacy mainstream media pushed a completely false reality. They lied to you.”

How long this position will last is anyone’s guess, given the ever-shifting nature of Trump’s coalition and the capricious winds of online popularity. "I think that at some point, probably fairly soon, someone’s ego is going to run afoul of someone else’s ego, and the whole thing’s going to fall apart," says Rothschild.

For now, there is one clear ruler of the MAGA media mirrorworld. And for perhaps the first time since 2016, it’s not Donald Trump.

This article was updated to add a reference to X's lawsuit against Media Matters.