How Elon Musk’s X is fueling the MAGA-Trump split

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. Sign up here.