Even those who scoff at the Trump campaign’s claim that Monday night’s X Spaces conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was the interview of the century may buy into my colleague Joe Berkowitz’s conclusion that the event was a coup for Musk and X. Exactly how many people were paying attention seems to be a mystery. Whatever that number, it wasn’t small, and as I write this newsletter on Tuesday, articles about the broadcast are still on the homepages of major news outlets.
But though the interview may have been a coup, it was far from an unalloyed triumph. If you tuned in at the appointed time, chances were you kept getting kicked out of the X Spaces room without explanation. Once you got in, you heard slightly creepy hold music and then silence, punctuated by rustling sounds from Trump’s microphone. Only after 42 minutes did the candidate and the tech billionaire start chatting.
Musk blamed the glitchiness on a massive DDoS attack, an excuse that seems to be open to question. Regardless, it was emblematic of X’s rickety state as a force for political discourse during the 2024 presidential campaign—and reminiscent of how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign kickoff on Spaces fell victim to similar gremlins at the very start of the race.
To call this a post-Twitter election is literally true, given that the service once known as Twitter has been officially named X for more than a year now. Something deeper is going on, though. By any name, it’s not what it was before Musk’s takeover.
Now, I’m not saying political Twitter/X is dead. Actually, its critical mass of politicians, pundits, partisans, reporters, and campaign junkies is largely intact—maybe more so than other once-thriving communities such as tech Twitter, which has definitely dwindled. The odds of a great migration of politics away from X are lessened by the fact that Meta’s Threads, the only Twitter-esque service with mass-media scale, has made a conscious decision to downplay the topic—for now, at least.
Still, politics on Twitter has lost a fair percentage of the spark it first showed 16 years ago, when Barack Obama vs. John McCain became the first presidential election to be chronicled by the service’s users. (It was a pretty cozy place back then: There were only about six million of us.) From Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance to the attempt on Trump’s life to Biden’s withdrawal and Vice President Kamala Harris’s instant, crowd-pleasing emergence as his successor, the past seven weeks have been among the most eventful in the history of political campaigns. But as far as I can tell, that hasn’t translated into X being radically more interesting than usual.
That might be inevitable, given that the platform’s days of novelty are long over. Old media don’t vanish, as proven by the continued existence of cable news, talk radio, and printed newspapers and newsmagazines, all of which still play a role in how we experience politics. It’s just that old staples tend to clamor for continued relevance rather than dominating the conversation. X may be settling into a similar equilibrium.
Then there’s the sea change that took place in January 2021, when Donald Trump—who, as president, relied on the platform for everything from announcing major policy shifts to firing senior administration officials—was “permanently” banished in the wake of his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Facing similar bans from other social platforms, he decamped to his own Twitter knockoff, Truth Social. Since then, most of his “Truths” have amounted to white noise more than news events, even when they involve grandiose statements such as his threatening to jail Mark Zuckerberg. His financial stake in his own service has kept him there despite Musk unbanning him soon after taking control of Twitter.
On Monday, the imminence of the Musk interview prompted a flurry of new material from @RealDonaldTrump, his X account’s first sustained activity in three and a half years. However, the ad-like posts showed no signs of being his own handiwork. As of this writing, they also ceased once the X Spaces interview had come and gone—seemingly confirming that even the once Twitter-addicted Trump has overcome his emotional attachment to the service. The lower Trump quotient makes X a more pleasant place in multiple ways, but it also makes it easier to ignore.
Trump’s less-than-enthusiastic return to X comes despite Musk’s endorsement of the Republican candidate and general willingness to leverage the platform to his preferred political ends in a manner sharply divergent from the Twitter of yore. Those moves are at odds with his stated desire to make X into even more of a digital town square, where every voice matters. So is his constant branding of journalists—some of X’s most loyal users and reliable content creators—as propagandists.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Musk’s stewardship of X to date, it’s that he rarely trifles with petty concerns such as running it like a business rather than a self-indulgence. For all the people who either fear or welcome him turning X into an extension of the Trump campaign, its influence on the vote could be less consequential than if he’d stayed out of the way.
Meanwhile, there’s TikTok. The wildly popular social network has little in common with X and tends to fly under the radar, partly because it’s never been a Twitter-like obsession for most journalists who might write about it. When everyone assumed the 2024 election would be a rematch of 2020’s nominees, Trump’s TikTok supporters were widely seen as generating more buzz than boosters of Biden, who—let’s face it—was hardly a social-media icon. The hipper, more meme-savvy Harris campaign has a shot at catching up.
Overall, though, TikTok’s potential impact on the remaining 12 weeks of the campaign remains murky. There’s reason for concern: As Hunter Schwarz recently reported for Fast Company, TikTok videos inspired by Trump’s manifestly false claim that Harris had used AI to fake a rally audience spread rapidly on the service, whose famously opaque algorithm is optimized for attention-grabbing, not fact-checking. X is far from an oasis of accuracy, especially given Musk’s penchant for personally sharing misinformation. But at least there are plenty of X users pushing back on the bad stuff.
When histories of this historic, uniquely strange time are written, it’s possible they’ll conclude that this was, for better or worse, the first real TikTok election. It would be useful to know for sure while it’s still going on—and that might require diverting some of the attention we’ve long lavished on Twitter/X.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company‘s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters.
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