What happens when the most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world – both accomplished by attention – clash on the Internet? We discover it in real time.
This week, billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump took their respective social platforms to escape the other after a fallout on federal spending. What started as a volley of beards made a snowball in a quarrel involving several social platforms and millions of spectators, because everyone, politicians of the big name to unnamed memes accounts was rushed to offer their sockets and declare their allegiances.
The split could have deep real consequences, because the two men show their will to take advantage of the financial and political power to retaliate to the other. It also illustrates the speed with which a conflict can degenerate when attenuated by algorithmic flows and the requirements of the economy of attention, which distributes indignation and savor a large -scale quarrel. While Trump and Musk surround their cars, stimulating support and dirtying the other thanks to articles on X and Truth Social, millions of smaller content creators should capitalize on the attention that the quarrel generates.
Thursday afternoon, the number of active users on X and TRUTH social mobile applications have both reached 90-day heights, according to preliminary estimates of Sensor Tower, an intelligence company on the market. Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., Eastern East time, the company estimates that the use of X increased by 54% compared to the previous seven days, while Truth Social increased by more than 400%, although from a much lower basic base.
“Public quarrels like this lead the commitment of social media as a madman,” said Casey Fiesler, professor of information sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder who studies social media ethics. “It is a content at high octane because it is easy to set up and very rewarded algorithmic.”
Musk, whose commercial empire includes X as well as Tesla, the SPACEX rocket company and the artificial intelligence start-up XAI, launched the fight on Tuesday when he published on X to criticize a Congress expenditure bill supported by the President:
“This bill on the spending of the massive, scandalous and pork congress is a disgusting abomination,” he wrote.
The message was viewed more than 141 million times and sparked a wave of comments on X and elsewhere online. The personality of the Internet Gen Z, Lil Tay, known for his external articles displaying luxury products, obtained 2.8 million views on an applauding response on Musk for his former support from Trump, while the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk has referred to “tweet heard worldwide in a post-promotion of viewers to Apple podcasts to disseminate his talk show.
Over the next two days, Musk continued to take Trump on X, at some point, publishing a survey asking if America needed a new centrist political party, while Trump told the White House journalists that his musk relationship was on the rocks.
Then, Thursday, Musk degenerated the back and forth by affirming in an article on X that Trump is involved in Epstein files, documents which contain the names of the people who conju with the late financial Jeffrey Epstein to sexually assault minors. The post exploded, attracting nearly 200 million views in one day and endeavor a second wave of content from politicians, creators and manufacturers of memes.
A message from an anonymous user X, loved by 192,300 people, reflected: “Who obtains JD Vance in the divorce?”
The vice-president quickly provided an answer, displaying that Trump “gained the confidence of the movement he directs”.
On X, where Musk’s modifications in the characteristic of verification of the platform scrambled the boundaries between real public figures and paid subscribers, the false politicians have joined the fray. “Each time I feel a movement, I know that you will be next to it,” came an answer to Vance of an account for the representative Jack Kimble – a member of the fictitious congress with more than 93,000 subscribers whose messages have often deceived social media users.
Former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon seized the moment to make the headlines with his podcast, in which he called Trump to grasp SpaceX and perhaps even to expel Musk. Political creators such as Philip Defranco went to Tiktok with battered breaks of the quarrel, while the farm distant from Musk, Vivian Wilson, posted on her Instagram stories a clip of herself laughing, with legend, “I like to be proven”, perhaps in reference to past comments criticizing his father and his Trump.
In the community of Reddit R / Politics, so-called detectives led deep dives in the judicial files linked to Epstein, sometimes linking to the books and the YouTube series which claim to investigate the complais of celebrities of Epstein. The theories of the eccentric plot floated around X while the users supposed if Trump and Musk could secretly work together towards a noble end.
Critics of Musk and Trump have rejoiced at the case. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who, at 35, is a full-fledged social media star, was arrested on Thursday outside the American capital and asked for his reaction to the War of the Words of Trump and Musk. She quickly spit an online slogan: “Oh guy, girls fight, right?” The clip was spread quickly on Tiktok, where it was stimulated by left -wing heads and newspapers.
University research on online algorithms has shown that social flows often prioritize the content that arouses fear or rage. High -level fights can stimulate power and profiles of people involved, as with the infamous internet quarrels between Kim Kardashian and Kanye West or influencers Trisha Paytas and Ethan Klein, said Fiesler.
But trendy conflicts are also a boon for second -rate creators, who jump to offer “side sockets”, playing the day’s argument to generate traffic to their own products and profiles. A legal battle for a division between the Amber actress heard and her ex -husband Johnny Depp, for example, caused her own media ecosystem, with creators and channels dedicated entirely to the dissection of the quarrel – sometimes falsifying or exaggerating information to keep the viewers hanging.
“This (Fiesler said Fiesler.” The more people talk about it, the more people feel obliged to talk about it and take sides. “
It is a dynamic that the directors of this fight have long been mastered. Vance posted on X Thursday a photo of himself with the popular podcaster and actor Theo von, with the ironic legend, “slow news day, what are we going to talk about?”
Musk republished her, adding an emoji “laughing”.
Under the property of Musk, X lost the advertisers and users deactivated by its policy and its lax approach to hate speeches, with competitors such as Bluesky and Meta’s Threads simulturing left -wing users in particular. Now he risks alienating Trump’s loyalists. But in the meantime, even the criticisms of his management of X recognized Thursday that he seemed to have “the juice” – that is to say that it led the conversation – at least for the moment.
“An explosion of the public between the richest man in the world and the President of the United States is difficult for people to resist first-hand witnesses, even for those who cannot regularly use X,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice-president and main analyst at Emarketer, a market research company. “That said, our use of the media is so fragmented and we are bombed with the news of each chain that it is unlikely that it is significant or lasting.”
Truth Social, on the other hand, has become an increasingly important component of Trump’s communication strategy, the self -proclaimed chief influencer drawing a constant flow of messages – sometimes dozens per day – greeting his own actions or targeting rivals. The employees of the White House and the right-wing creators then distribute publications to other platforms, expanding the scope and influence of Truth Social, even if the sub-porcered platform compared to X, Threads or Bluesky. (The sensor tower estimates that X has about 100 times more active users.)
The Trump-Musk Brouhaha illustrates the way in which the culture of influence of online influencers has permeated politics, said Renée Dérésta, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at the University of Georgetown and author of “invisible leaders”.
“Online strengthening is not to be won-it’s a kind of performance,” she said. The interactive nature of social media allows the public to embark on action. “We choose sides, encourage our champion and continue the fight. We make memes – we can draw attention to ourselves and help shape the fight if we make good people.”
But what could be harmless in the case of celebrity gossip, she said, has a darker side when the evenings at war are among the most powerful people in the world.
In a striking example, a threat from Trump on Thursday to cancel government contracts with SpaceX encouraged Musk to answer that the company “will immediately begin to help out its dragon spacecraft” – a decision that would have broken the only way to transport NASA astronauts to the international space station.
A pseudonym X user who had less than 100 subscribers at the time responded to the musk position, the pressing to “take a step back” and reconsider. In a few hours, Musk replied: “Good advice. OK, we are not helpless Dragon.”
Online Bedlam prompted the sports commentator Darren Rovell to review a tweet he published in 2016 which has since become a meme: “I feel bad for our country. But it is enormous content.”
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