In the end, it’s probably useful that Elon Musk decided to rename Twitter to X. It allows us to better differentiate two increasingly divergent products: Twitter, which worked to stem abuse and misinformation, granting verification to reliable sources of information, and X, which has … taken a different tack.
Over the weekend, that included Musk’s lifting a ban on Alex Jones instituted by the social media platform’s previous leadership. Jones, as you are likely aware, was long the voice of the fringiest element of the right-wing fringe, using his broadcasting platform Infowars to elevate myriad and evolving conspiracy theories. It was the sort of nonsense that was very effective at building an audience that was definitionally deeply credulous — and then selling them snake-oil nutritional supplements.
There was a time when Jones, despite his obvious right-wing orientation, was simply too ridiculous and too out-there to be offered any attention by establishment Republicans. But that slowly shifted over the past few years, culminating in a Sunday night live chat in which Musk welcomed back Jones to the public conversation. Long-shot Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was there, too — a mark of how intertwined this transition is with broader Republican politics.
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Jones’s rehabilitation was predictable, given the trajectory of right-wing and Republican rhetoric over the past 20 years.
Shortly after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was a fracturing on the political right, with the Republican Party establishment seeing new challenges from an increasingly vocal grassroots that was viewing national politics through a frame defined not by the chair of the GOP but Fox News and right-wing radio voices. By 2015, demand for more and more fringe theories about the deviousness of the left had created space to Fox’s right — space filled by sites like Breitbart, which became the most popular media outlet on right-wing social media during the 2016 cycle.
Donald Trump (who, at a right-wing event this weekend, offered his old adviser Stephen K. Bannon a hug) understood this shift and reflected it. His ascent was rooted in empowering that anti-establishment voice without any qualms about the extent to which he and that voice elevated false claims. He was a truth-teller, his supporters argued, because he said the things that Breitbart and similar sites were arguing. Other Republicans, eager to glom onto Trump’s support adopted the same approach. The establishment shifted to the right — and space was created to even more fringe voices further to the right, the place where Alex Jones sat. The center moved to the right, so the fringe got closer to the center. (Jones claims that Trump, who sat for an interview with Jones before the 2016 race, called to thank the radio host after his victory that year.)
There’s an obvious reason for Republicans and others on the right to be more receptive to conspiratorial assertions. The GOP’s rhetoric for decades has centered on the need to reduce the scale and scope of government, in part out of an ideological opposition to constraints on individual freedom and, in part, because smaller government means less taxation. But this rhetoric collapses easily into hostility to governance in general, which overlaps with decaying trust in institutions broadly.
It’s not surprising, then, when we see poll results like those offered by YouGov last month. Presented with a range of conspiracy theories, Republicans were consistently more likely than Americans overall and than Democrats to believe that the theories were definitely or probably true. More than half of Republicans, for example, said it was at least “probably true” that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” And more than half said the same of more recently developed conspiracy theories: that Obama was born outside the United States and that voting machines flipped votes in the 2020 election.
Nearly 3 in 10 Republicans said the Obama-birther theory was definitely true. A fifth said the same of the voting machines conspiracy — though both have been debunked as robustly as possible.
But it’s easy to see how this works. Consider that claim that there is a cabal of elites running the world. It’s self-reinforcing; there are necessarily people who are in charge of the world and it is trivial to present them as belonging to a secret group of actors as a result. You can take anyone with any power in any context and do the same thing, suggest they have power because of links to the cabal, when the reality is that the conspiracy theorist is putting them into the cabal because they have power.
We have a good, recent example of this courtesy of Musk himself. He elevated a false claim on X that had been promoted by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who, after helping Fox better compete on the right-wing fringe, announced he is starting his own media outlet in the vein of Infowars — alleging that the government was trying to silence a critic. Musk’s post was corrected by X’s in-house annotation system, Community Notes.
“Interesting,” Musk responded. “This Note is being gamed by state actors. Will be helpful in figuring who they are.”
That’s the workflow: false conspiracy, correction, looping correction into the conspiracy. If you think that institutions are corrupt and dominated by a powerful, global cabal, it’s a simple shift. More broadly, the process takes things that happened and frames them in a new way.
Last week, University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird presented a new analysis showing that this is often how false information propagates.
“[O]ur research suggests the problem is not merely about bad facts,” Starbird wrote. “Though fabrications and outright lies certainly contribute to the challenge of misinformation, we are more often misled not by false evidence but by misinterpretations and mischaracterizations.”
She centered on the example of false information about voting in Arizona during the 2020 election, a microcosm of the national effort to amplify the idea that the election was somehow stolen — an idea often referred to as “the Big Lie.”
“The Big Lie took shape not merely as a series of lies communicated from elites to their audiences, but also as a series of misinterpretations and mischaracterizations from a motivated crowd who was willing (and in some cases eager) to misperceive the world through the ‘rigged election’ frame,” Starbird explained. “Online influencers played an important role as well, gathering that evidence, echoing it back down to their audiences to motivate more contributions, and filtering it up to elites who would use it to reinforce their 'rigged election’ frames.”
The YouGov poll which established that most Republicans think it was probably true that voting machines flipped votes in 2020 also measured the extent to which people thought they could effectively identify fake news. Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to say that they felt “very” or “somewhat” confident in their ability to do so.
This makes sense; those who believe something that isn’t true aren’t likely to also believe that they are incapable of identifying what is and isn’t true. If you think the election was stolen, despite the dearth of evidence in support of that idea, it’s because you accept the framework identified by Starbird. You view that as the real news — not the hectoring of fact-checkers and others who point out that the framework itself is incorrect.
So Alex Jones is back on X, where he can present new frameworks for existing information, as he long has. He arrives on a platform that has been reoriented to make it easier for him to do that and as a member of a political group that is more likely than its opponents to be receptive to his efforts.
The 2024 election is in less than 11 months.