Months before Elon Musk made his $44 billion move into social media in 2022, he tweeted that "for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral". So much for that, said Siân Boyle in The Observer. The proliferation of "alt-right diatribe, hate speech and bots" on the renamed X led to mounting disquiet among users, which reached a climax after Donald Trump's election victory.
X's newest rival, Bluesky, gained one million new users over just 24 hours last week, taking its total to 16 million. That's small fry compared with Twitter's estimated 586 million monthly active users. But some wonder whether this week will go down as the beginning of the end for X. The platform has effectively become "Truth Social premium", declared one analyst. Indeed, there is speculation that a merger between X and Trump's platform could be in the works. If that happens, whose interests would take priority? In the ongoing balkanisation of social media, the former Twitter could "fade away" or morph into an authoritarian "political super-app masquerading as social media".
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