Progressive accounts and fundraisers for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris have had their reach limited on X in recent days.
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.
Matt J, who declined to give his full last name, works in the legal profession in South Carolina. Despite running the left-leaning account “Blue Resistors In Red States”, he’s pushed content from far-right-wing provocateurs like Laura Loomer, on his “For You” page practically every day.
“I’m getting pushed information from the fringes of right-wing people who I don’t even follow,” Matt J tells Al Jazeera.
Maryanne Chisholm, a progressive X user, tells Al Jazeera something similar. She continually gets pushed by content from far-right elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene who she blocked.
“I go on every day and people I’ve blocked pop back up as people I’m following,” Chisholm told Al Jazeera
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.
Musk has allowed Trump and his allies to voice their views unchecked. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, even referred to the interview as “unfiltered”.
At the same time, Musk isn’t giving the same freedom to liberal voices who are trying to get their messaging across before the general election.
In recent weeks, amid Kamala Harris’s clinch of the Democratic presidential nomination, Musk has increasingly become more hostile towards her and her campaign. In response to a post from Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, Musk said that the sitting vice president’s “philosophy would cause a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!” Last Wednesday, he made the false claim that “Kamala is quite literally a communist.”
His angst towards Harris is also translating to what consumers see on their respective feeds. Across X, users were unable to follow KamalaHQ, Harris’s campaign page. The issue was so widespread that it caught the attention of congressional leaders. On July 23, New York Representative Jerry Nadler called on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate why this happened and if Musk had any involvement. The House Judiciary Committee is chaired by Jim Jordan who has been a vocal critic of “big tech” political censorship of conservatives.