Musk's efforts to influence who wins next week's US presidential election have continued. For example, over the past three months, he has donated more than US$100 million to a political action committee called America PAC that's promoting Trump. But our new research (currently available in preprint form) indicates Musk may be wielding influence in other more subtle ways as well. However, the platform's increasing opacity to researchers makes this difficult to say for certain. Shortly after Musk endorsed Trump's presidential campaign, there was a statistically anomalous boost in engagement with his X account. Suddenly, his posts were getting much higher views, retweets and likes in comparison to other prominent political accounts on the platform. This raises suspicions as to whether Musk has tweaked the platform's algorithm to increase the reach of his posts in advance of the US presidential election. It also demonstrates the problems with how social media platforms like X are...
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