Are Democrats facing an “existential crisis?” About the future of the party, yeah. Around the prospect of an emboldened second Trump administration, sure. But how about on X, formerly known as Twitter? Politico makes the case:
The situation is … complicated for Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections. It might seem a trivial matter, but the trend has prompted a larger debate that encapsulates the many other conversations the liberal ecosystem — elected officials, Hill staffers, administration aides, activists, lobbyists, opinion-shapers and beyond — is having in the wake of Trump’s election win: Should left-leaning people and Democratic voters wall MAGA off as much as possible and hope that eventually it suffocates? Or try even harder to meet those voters where they are, or at least understand them?
The intraparty argument is pretty straightforward. On the pro-leaving side, you hear from a strategist who says that X is now undeniably “a vehicle to support Musk’s political views and his candidates” — a right-skewing platform owned by someone whose support for the incoming president has been rewarded with his very own government agency. Making the case that Democrats should stay, you have a young congressman, Maxwell Frost, suggesting that leaving X “will help Elon with his goal of making the platform void of any progressive ideology or the way we think about the world.” Similarly, an anonymous source suggests that “leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.” These all strike me as reasonable positions on their own terms: It does seem a little ridiculous to carry on with routine party messaging, promotion, networking, or community building on a platform run by someone who just spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat you. On the other hand, a party trying to rebuild itself should at least be able to meet people where they are, even if the venue is hostile. (“Go on Rogan,” etc.)
The problem with these arguments, though, is that they’re talking about a platform that doesn’t really exist anymore. Twitter wasn’t just renamed — the platform has been gut-renovated in ways that, while they might have clear political outcomes or reflect the owner’s ideologies, have changed the service in more profoundly. It doesn’t really matter, in other words, whether Democrats leave X — X doesn’t care. It left them first.
X really has turned to the right in ways that are both objectively quantifiable and widely experienced subjectively. If you were there when it was Twitter, and you’re still there now, your feeds — both the algorithmic “For You” version and the chronological list — have changed. You see different things even if nothing about your habits has changed. At the very least, you’re probably seeing a lot more unhinged posts from the man in charge. This is noticeable but might feel manageable; it’s is the sort of experience Democratic X leavers and remainers are referring to when they make their cases to go or stay.
The far bigger changes, though, are structural. In 2022, when X, then still called Twitter, started selling user-account verification, Musk described a related long-term plan. “Over time, maybe not that long of time, when you look at mentions, replies, whatnot, the default will be to look at verified,” he told a group of advertisers. “You can still look at unverified, just as in your Gmail or whatever you can still look at the probable spam folder.” Twitter’s old verification system, which was intended to prevent impersonation, didn’t confer much in the way of special visibility or reach. The purchasable new verification system is more like a form of advertising — it gives users more visibility. If you want to be seen, you pay.
As X’s broader advertising prospects kept getting worse, Musk leaned more and more into subscriptions as the platform’s path forward. His prediction about what users would be seeing gradually came true. At the same time, he made other changes: X introduced longer text posts, a view-based payment system for subscribers, and thoroughly deprioritized links to the outside web, reducing the platform’s utility for building or connecting with an audience anywhere but on X itself. (There are some stark numbers to back this up: Both the Guardian and the Boston Globe recently reported getting significantly more referral traffic to stories from Bluesky, the fast-growing but comparatively minuscule X alternative, than from X itself.)
All but the most visible, verified-by-default Democrats (and fellow travelers) on X spent the last election alongside the rest of the unverified users in X’s proverbial spam folder, mostly invisible to the rest of the platform but especially to people who didn’t already follow and want to hear from them. They might have been scrolling in a familiar-enough place. But they were posting into a void, living out a sort of mass shadowban of everyone who wasn’t willing to pay for a subscription. It wasn’t harrowing so much as strange and a little sad, with established users going through the motions, posting and sharing and waiting, propelled by years of habit, imagining audiences where they simply no longer existed.
Again, it’s impossible to disentangle these changes from Elon Musk’s political preferences and larger project. (He’s even said, in hindsight, that his purchase of the platform was intended to stop the “woke mind virus.”) He didn’t just loosen speech restrictions and fiddle with a few algorithmic knobs to adjust the mix of content. He turned X from a wide-open, porous network of networks — a service that produced a lot of value for a lot of disparate groups of people but which captured very little value itself — into a closed platform that, while producing much less value for fewer people, was going to capture as much of it as possible. Compared to Twitter, which was a genuinely unusual social-media platform among its peers, it feels like a wild change.
If you can set aside the elite psychodrama surrounding Musk’s takeover, though, you can more clearly see something else: an utterly new platform built within the old one, modeled not on Twitter but on all of its much more successful competitors. In its deprioritization of links, and emphasis on on-platform content, X is following Facebook’s lead circa 2015. In its desperate but persistent attempt to build a paid on-platform creator economy, it’s mimicking YouTube. In its pivot from feeds, friends, followers, and persistent audiences to disorienting algorithmic video recommendations, it’s chasing after TikTok (and Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts).
This new platform-within-a-platform does not appear to be growing as quickly as its host is shrinking, but it’s the future of X, as long as Musk is in charge. To the extent it’s a place where anyone can get a message out, it’s on narrow new terms for a narrow new audience. Maybe it’s still worth it. Or maybe the effort would be better spent on the platforms X is so desperate to catch up with — or, better yet, on something new.
