Why X is Missing the Big Picture

The platform is failing the larger population

Elon Musk promised to make Twitter the social media platform for the masses. Gone would be the days of the very loud radical minorities, and a new era of more reasonable people having nuanced debates on complicated issues would emerge.

As a person with a respectable follower base on X.com (formerly twitter), I really wanted the platform to do well. Not because I have illusions of becoming a big influencer and making a living doing so, but because it was a great hobby. I enjoyed doing deep dives into complicated issues long before anybody knew about me on Twitter, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my takes and approach with people on intellectually provacative subjects like like Covid-19, the Great Reset, politics, history, science, geopolitics, etc. Above all I’ve tried to strive for intellectual honesty: be honest about facts, don’t resort to logical fallacies, don’t try to appeal to people’s emotions/fears/outrage, and most importantly admit when I’m wrong or change your mind. Am I always successful? Hell no! But I do try.

Yet lately I’ve grown incredibly disillusioned with the platform because it has become a completely twisted verion of reality…something very frustrating to someone that values intellectual honesty and the concept of objective reality. One of the things I learned, the hard way, about Twitter is that you have to take time away from the platform to ground yourself or “touch grass” as some people say. Otherwise you’ll start to confuse the platform with reality. This isn’t something new…it’s always been this way. But it has gotten exponentially worse in recent years, and to understand why we need to go back only a few years.

When Elon Musk took over the platform, I was elated. I was one of the people that comprised the original “Team Reality” during the early days of Covid-19 before it was overtaken by grifters looking to push various agendas or garner clicks. And as you can imagine I was censored and suspended by the previous administration for posting things like the CDC’s own data.

Elon taking over Twitter felt like a breath of fresh air after the oppressive censorship of woke progressive leadership. I was all in on free speech and I though Elon was going to revolutionize social media.

But here we are and I can honestly say it has not gone as I had hoped. All that Elon accomplished was to exchange one extreme model with another.

Under the old regime, the platform leaned heavily into progressive biases, suppressing voices that challenged the dominant narratives on issues like public health, identity politics, or climate change. It felt like an echo chamber for the far left, where dissent was often labeled as misinformation or hate speech. Elon's vision of "maximum free speech" sounded like the perfect antidote: a marketplace of ideas where the best arguments would rise to the top, and bad ones would be debunked through open debate. In theory, good speech would drive out the bad, fostering a space for that 80% in the middle to engage reasonably, just like in his quote about maximizing human happiness.

But, what we've ended up with isn't a balanced town square; it's a platform that's swung wildly to the other extreme, amplifying radical voices and turning into a breeding ground for outrage. X has become more polarized than ever, a virtual cesspool where racism, neofascism, antisemitism, and unbridled hate flourish unchecked. Posts glorifying white supremacy, denying the Holocaust, or pushing moral relativism rack up millions of views, while nuanced takes get buried in the noise.

Why has this happened? It's not just a failure of theory; it's a combination of systemic issues that Elon either ignored or exacerbated. First, foreign bots and influence operations have warped the entire ecosystem. Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern bot farms, powered by AI, impersonate Americans to push propaganda, sow division, and boost divisive narratives: whether it's antisemitism, anti-Ukraine or just general anti-western propaganda. These aren't fringe actors; they're state-backed campaigns that flood the platform, artificially inflating traction for extreme views and drowning out moderate ones. In 2024 and into 2025, we've seen them manipulate everything from U.S. politics to global conflicts, turning X into a tool for foreign malign influence.

Second, the lack of even basic moderation has turned X into a free-for-all. We're not talking about censoring debate…this is about common-sense rules that 95% of us would agree on: like banning overt calls for genocide or rampant racial slurs. Without that, extremism thrives.

Third, and perhaps most damning, Elon himself has used his massive personal platform to elevate some of the most radical and dishonest influencers, mostly on the right. His feed is filled with alarmism, outrage, and conspiracy theories…and his repeated interaction with far-right accounts has only increasing their reach and influence. Meanwhile, Elon is notorious for following then unfollowing some of the more intellectually honest accounts on X when they disagree with him…which is such a bad look for him and the platform.

Some of you might think that this is a small price to pay for unfettered free speech…and I’ve also held out hope that things would get better, but they just haven’t and won’t. And that’s because X is completely disconnected from the reality that we experience on a daily basis, and polling continues to show this is the case. Ultimately, not only has X failed to cater to the 80% in the middle, but I think it’s actually driven them away.

In fact, X has become increasingly useless for the casual user because the narratives and news cycle are completely different from the rest of the world. For example, you might see Candace Owen’s “reporting” on Brigitte Macron being born a man trending and filling up your feed…but it’s not a something anybody cares about outside of the perpetually online X users. So not only can average people not relate to the trending content, but the content is completely useless for them in their real lives. Even for me, after I take a few days off it’s incredibly difficult to jump right back into things because I’m not in tune with the latest X thing.

And the problem for X is that people are starting to notice this disconnect. What makes this platform such a powerhouse is all the important people, particularly political, on here. They, and their staff, look to X for realtime feedback on issues and it really has been an incredibly powerful tool for influencing political discourse…but will it still be that when it becomes clear to everybody that X is completely decoupled from the real world? At this point, should any politician really care about the prevailing opinions on X?

If Elon truly wants to maximize human happiness, he needs to course-correct: rein in the bots, restore sensible moderation, and stop platforming radicals. Otherwise, X will continue alienating the masses it was supposed to serve, becoming a relic for the fringes rather than a platform for all. I still hope for better, but right now, I'm touching grass more often than scrolling.