Elon Musk's Twitter takeover made the platform an even more noxious misinformation machine

For about as long as today’s high school seniors have been alive, Twitter has served as a public square for the political discourse of the day. An oft-heard refrain is “Twitter isn’t real life.” And that was true to a degree. Twitter simply never had the reach of longtime heavyweights such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, or newcomers like TikTok. But it didn’t necessarily have to. There’s a reason former President Donald Trump was tweeting through his 2020 election loss right up until his account was banned on Jan. 6, 2021. Now known as X in the wake of its controversial takeover by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the website formerly known as Twitter has descended, by virtually every measure, into a bigger cesspool of misinformation than it has ever been. According to GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index for 2023, X ranked the worst out of the major social media platforms when it came to fighting anti-LGBTQ hate. In GLAAD’s scoring mechanism, the site dropped 12 points, from 45% to 33%, between 2022 and 2023. And thanks to changes made by Musk, it’s become substantially more difficult for researchers hoping to uncover the networks behind disinformation or to study the scale
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