Social media’s reckoning may have arrived — thanks to Elon Musk

In 2014, Buzzfeed News reported on the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” based in Russia that waged an organized propaganda campaign across social media. According to internal emails, operatives were instructed to run multiple Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts, bombard comment sections and build fake audiences to shape American political discourse. It’s a method employed by Russia that dates back to at least the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet nearly two decades later, the U.S. is still debating the scope and geographical breadth of our foreign troll problem. All the while, fraudulent accounts have continued to flourish.

In 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the news-heavy platform he’s since rebranded as X, the multi-billionaire immediately reinstated accounts banned for hate speech and violent disinformation, including Donald Trump’s. A 2024 CNN analysis of 56 pro-Trump accounts on X revealed “a systematic pattern of inauthentic behavior.” Fifteen even displayed blue check marks, indicating they had been officially verified by the company. Eight used stolen photos of well-known European influencers to lend credibility.

Musk himself has personally boosted extremist propaganda and repeatedly retaliated against journalists who criticized him. Under his leadership, X has dismantled many of the mechanisms and teams designed to safeguard against the distribution of falsehoods and conspiracy theories on the platform. Monetization on X is largely driven by engagement, and nothing gets people engaged like riling them over culture wars. In practice, this generates misplaced outrage to manufacture consent for policy. It’s been a near-perfect feedback loop in the second Trump administration — until MAGA started turning against Trump. 

In October, as the internecine squabbling among Trump’s base showed signs of toppling the coalition in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, X’s head of product Nikita Bier floated a new location-exposing feature. But it wasn’t until Fox News’ Katie Pavlich made a public appeal to Musk in a Nov. 15 post — “Foreign bots are tearing America apart,” she said — that the company took action. “Give me 72 hours,” Bier replied to Pavlich the following day.

Friday’s rollout of the new feature was a chaotic, error-laden mess that nonetheless garnered praise from conservatives, including Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and podcaster Dave Rubin, a right-wing influencer who was confirmed by the Justice Department to be a subcontractor of Russian intelligence. Several top MAGA accounts were exposed as operating in Nigeria. (A warning note appears if a VPN is detected, and X gives users a choice to display a broader region, especially in places where free speech could be risky. The platform is banned in Russia, for example, and people are forced to use a VPN.) The users know what they are doing — many pose as MAGA to get more engagement. Pretending to be a right-wing agitator is one of the most efficient ways to game the system. 

Bier said on Saturday that X’s data “was not 100 percent” and briefly pulled access to the feature. Several users warned of a potentially dangerous unveiling of private information performed without clear guardrails, consent or accountability. Journalists who report on authoritarian regimes, for example, are shown as “based” in incorrect locations that could result in them being targeted by the very governments they cover.

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There are many reasons X’s new initiative matters. But how it affects journalists is among the most important. A decade ago, political reporters and commentators were among Twitter’s heaviest users; people often went to the platform for breaking news and hot takes. While that has declined due to Musk’s dropping of safeguards, journalists remain among those potentially most impacted by inauthentic accounts.

X isn’t the only social media platform dealing with safety issues. According to testimony by Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar that was revealed on Friday in an unsealed court filing, the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that engaged in human sex trafficking. In practice, this meant that an account could violate the platform’s prostitution and solicitation policies 16 times before Meta, its parent company, suspended the account.

Worse yet, Meta studied the solutions to child safety problems, calculated the growth impact — and then allegedly shelved the fixes for years. According to the court filings, the company conducted internal studies that found causal links between social media use and mental health issues, such as increased social comparison, anxiety and depression. One highlighted study, referred to internally as “Project Mercury,” allegedly showed that users who deactivated Facebook or Instagram for a week reported lower feelings of depression, loneliness and anxiety. 

It’s difficult to overstate how damning this research is. Meta had its own evidence that its product presented a public health risk, and the company chose the path that protected revenue, not people.

The lifeblood of social media platforms is engagement, and rage is a reliable driver. Whether the rage-drivers are foreign is mostly uncontrollable. Algorithms are easier to control, yet there’s little incentive to implement any guardrails. We cannot rely on platforms to self-regulate when their core business model favors growth and engagement over transparency and safety. 

They built these systems deliberately. They profit from them massively. And they will not relinquish that power voluntarily. Simply calling for “better content moderation” or “more transparency” is insufficient. What’s needed is systemic regulatory reform.