Under Elon Musk, Twitter’s Political Divide Deepens Markedly

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the social media platform has changed—markedly. Leaving aside the drama within the company, the site itself has experienced outages(Opens in a new window), exposed tweets meant for private Twitter Circles, and broken threads(Opens in a new window), and among other things.

But far worse than these functionality breakdowns has been the uptick in hate speech on the platform. Along with this rise, Republicans now feel far more warmly toward Twitter than they did in the past, according to a Pew Research Center study(Opens in a new window). 

Post-Musk, Republican and Republican-leaning Twitter users feel much differently about Twitter’s effect on American democracy. Their belief that it is mostly bad for American democracy dropped from 60% in 2021 to 21% today, and their opinion that the site is mostly good for democracy has risen from 17% to 43%.

Those who identify as Democrats and are Democratic-leaning do not feel that the platform is as good for American democracy: their number decreased from 47% in 2021 to 24% now. And the number of respondents in this group who say Twitter is bad for democracy has increased, from 28% to 35%.

(Credit: Pew Research Center)

A majority of Democratic users (68%) report that they believe Twitter has inaccurate or misleading information; 37% of Republicans think the same. Nearly the same number of Democratic users (65%) say harassment and abuse from other users is a major problem on Twitter, compared with 29% of Republican users. This gap has increased 36 percentage points from 2021. 

The divide is only going to grow. Musk has supported far-right users(Opens in a new window) and accounts, including Libs of TikTok(Opens in a new window), and boosted conspiracy theories such as the one about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband(Opens in a new window). This week, Musk has been peddling racism and the idea that the mass shooting in Allen, Texas, is a psyop:

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

Tucker Carlson, who is known for the extremist and white-supremacist views that he spread through his now-canceled show on Fox News, recently said he is relaunching the program on Twitter(Opens in a new window). Though Musk has said the show will be subject to Community Notes, a Twitter feature that is designed to label and add context to tweets with misinformation, the presence of Carlson on Twitter can only make things more divisive on the platform.