How will Elon Musk shape Twitter?

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MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE, an ultra-Trumpy conspiracy theorist in the House of Representatives, was in high spirits on October 27th. “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!!” tweeted the Republican congresswoman, as Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed new “Chief Twit” of Twitter, at last took control of the company. His professed admiration for free speech is being celebrated on the right, whose denizens complain that controls over the spread of misinformation online are an affront to their liberties. This is having a big impact on who uses Twitter. Many more people follow left-wing accounts on the platform than right-wing ones. But when news of Mr Musk’s bid to buy Twitter first broke in April, The Economist charted how Twitter’s centre of gravity was shifting to the right. We have run an update in the days since Mr Musk’s acquisition was completed, to see if a similar pattern occurred (see chart).

The data present a clear trend. In the four days after Mr Musk took the keys to Twitter, Republican members of Congress collectively gained around 470,000 followers, or an average of 1,800 each. The surge in followers on the day after the deal’s completion was just over half the size of the increase in April. Ms Taylor Greene gained the most of any Republican in the four days after the deal: the number of followers of her official account grew by 7% (her personal account was banned in January). Lauren Boebert, another Republican representative with ties to QAnon, a barmy conspiracy theory, was close behind with a 5% increase.

The opposite was true for Democrats in both chambers. Their House and Senate representatives lost 420,000 followers between October 27th and 30th, an average of 1,600 each. The biggest names on the left took harder hits. Kamala Harris, the vice-president, Elizabeth Warren, a senior democratic senator, and Bernie Sanders, a progressive senator, had all lost more than 35,000 followers since the acquisition (though that makes up less than 1% of their followers).

These changes are likely to be a result of right-leaning users joining the platform and left-leaning users leaving. In April Twitter said that the sudden changes were driven by the creation and deactivation of accounts.

Followers of Democratic accounts still outnumber Republican ones, so if anything the platform is becoming more balanced between the two parties. But the wave of new joiners may already be having an impact. An analysis by Bloomberg, a media company, found that mentions of an unspecified racial slur on the platform increased by 1,300% after Mr Musk’s acquisition. The word was tweeted 170 times every five minutes. Mr Musk has insisted that Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape”. But the early signs are not promising.■