The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy saga is blowing up in the White House’s face — and social-media experts say that Elon Musk’s remake of X helped light the fuse.
Conspiracy
theories about Epstein, and the Trump administration’s supposed complicity in
silencing them, are starting to split MAGA’s unruly factions and
turn part of the movement against the president. (For those not following
closely: The Department of Justice and FBI issued a joint report last week claiming
that Epstein did not have an “incriminating ‘client list’” of powerful
individuals whom he introduced to exploited minors — a finding that defied the
hopes of far-right Epstein truthers who President Donald Trump and his allies
had been encouraging.)
It
was Musk himself who wrenched the Epstein affair back into public consciousness
during his first open spat with Trump in
June. In a now-deleted X post, Musk wrote,
“@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have
not been made public.” Trump has not been officially accused of any wrongdoing
connected to Epstein.
But Musk bears a deeper
responsibility for the mess as well, say experts in online speech — and for
whatever damage it inflicts on Trump’s coalition. A huge amount of the
infighting has unfurled on X, from Musk’s initial accusations to far-right
activist Laura Loomer’s attacks on
Attorney General Pam Bondi, to Infowars founder Alex Jones raging at “deep state” puppet masters in
the administration.
“X
is really ground zero for a lot of what’s going on,” Joan Donovan, a Boston
University professor who studies misinformation, told POLITICO. She added, “It
acts as a constant headache for powerful politicians and the mega-rich that
still use the platform.”
This
would have been unthinkable on Twitter before Musk’s reign, when a team of content
moderators tried to tamp down on volatile conspiracy theories by kicking off
many of the users who are now raising a ruckus.
Musk acquired the site for $44
billion in 2022 and began rebuilding it in the name of “free speech.” By
dramatically loosening content moderation rules, X put Republican elites face
to face with the fringes of the right — and brought their intramural arguments
out of the shadows of 8kun, Gab and other less moderated sites.
X did not respond to
POLITICO’s request for comment.
Back
when it was known as Twitter, the platform mounted a series of initiatives to
counteract conspiracy theories that were spilling out to create real-world
chaos. Twitter tried off and on to purge QAnon content, especially
after it was linked to several violent incidents. It then
suspended tens of thousands of accounts
connected to the Capitol riot in 2021, including Trump’s — triggering a massive
GOP blowback against social media companies that still continues.
Members
of these movements had long tried to evade Twitter’s moderators. Donovan, who was closely watching the online groups at the
time, said that many “de-identified as QAnon” and then attached themselves to
Stop the Steal, the election-conspiracy campaign that was slightly more
mainstream, at least until it culminated in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Given
Twitter’s somewhat inhospitable conditions, the far right’s more fantastical narratives
tended to flourish on alternative sites such as 4chan, its offshoot 8kun,
Rumble and Gab.
That all changed when
Musk took over Twitter, later renaming it X, and promised to create a digital
public square that welcomed content and influential accounts that had
previously been banned. Their audiences came along, and X is now the main hub
for crackpot beliefs.
“These alternative platforms still exist,”
said Jared Holt, a specialist in online extremism at the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue. “But the cultural capital they hold in the Trump movement
has been almost entirely displaced by X.”
Toxic
conspiracy theories used to gestate on alternative platforms and
then spread to bigger sites. The anonymous leader of QAnon, who claimed to be a
senior federal official, would post messages on 8kun that followers would then
take to Facebook and Twitter. This content no longer has to cross-pollinate, as
users have been emboldened to post it directly on X.
The
big tent that X provides allows fringe users to directly confront prominent
allies of the president, particularly in the comments of their
posts. Their streams and posts often land on X’s Discover feed, giving the
content extra visibility among the mainstream and more center-right media.
“As far as they’re concerned, it is activism
to be posting on social media,” Renée DiResta, a Georgetown University
professor who researches online conspiracy theories, told POLITICO.
“Particularly for the right, they’re not wrong that … posting achieves
results.”
According
to Donovan, somewhat more mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace
Owens have been able to harness this anger on X. She says Carlson in particular
has “managed to move from the mainstream to the fringes, and then bring some
people from the fringes back towards the MAGA right.”
Carlson,
who straddles these two worlds, has promoted some of the more obscure threads
of the Epstein affair. He suggested during a Turning Point USA conference
Friday that Epstein had connections to the Israeli government,
playing into the theory that the deceased sex offender ran a blackmail ring on
behalf of the country. That narrative is being amplified on X by Carlson himself, and by the likes
of TPUSA’s Benny Johnson and conservative
commentator Megyn Kelly. The platform is
bringing family arguments within the right into public view, and turning the
conspiracy theory ecosystem from an asset to a liability for Trump.
This
article originally appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO’s afternoon
newsletter about tech, politics and power.