Progressive accounts and fundraisers for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris have had their reach limited on X in recent days. Elon Musk has allowed US presidential candidate Donald Trump to have a free run on X even as he has been accused of throttling views he doesn’t agree with [File: Etienne Laurent and Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP] By Andy Hirschfeld Published On 13 Aug 2024 13 Aug 2024 Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and changed its name to X, he has banned journalists critical of him, and been accused of censoring Democratic voices while simultaneously amplifying those of far-right extremists, even while claiming to be a “free speech absolutist”. While BlueSky, Meta’s Threads and others have gained from users disaffected with X, they pale in comparison to X’s hold on the information landscape. His history of censoring views he doesn’t agree with and his full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump has raised concerns that there will be an information void before the consequential United States Presidential election. After all, 65 percent of the platforms’ users go for news content according to a recent report from Pew Research. (…) On Monday, Elon Musk, who has no background in journalism, spent more than an hour interviewing former President Donald Trump on a myriad of issues. Musk gave Trump free rein to spread his message unfiltered and without a fact-checking apparatus to debunk his lies in real-time. Throughout the interview, Trump was allowed to make false and misleading claims ranging from tax policy to immigration. Trump repeated the false claim that the vice resident was appointed as Biden’s “border czar”. In 2021, Biden tasked the vice president with addressing the root causes of migration — why people want to leave their nation of origin in the first place —- not border security.
via al jazeera: The right-wing lurch of X under Elon Musk