Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Non-public Components and an Echo Chamber

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A group of tweets scrolling horizontally throughout the display screen, all posted by Elon Musk, exhibits varied memes, referencing Pepe the Frog, Dogecoin and parodies of the L.G.B.T.Q. motion.

The day after Thanksgiving, almost one month after Elon Musk turned the proprietor of Twitter, he returned to one among his interest horses. “I’m simply preventing without spending a dime speech in America,” he wrote in a tweet.

One in all 28 that he posted that day — starting simply after midnight, following messages about how tasty his vacation meal was — the free speech tweet was in response to 2 followers who have been aggrieved about how Mr. Musk was being handled since buying the social community in late October. The publish was appreciated greater than 46,000 occasions.

The institution media is indignant at @elonmusk as a result of:— Twitter is not underneath the management of the institution and its activist allies— He carried out meritocratic insurance policies and fired their associates who “labored” at Twitter— The general public can now brazenly query the narrative

1:00 AM · Nov 25, 2022

Mr. Musk has usually stated that Twitter must be extra open and crammed with a higher variety of voices and factors of view. However Mr. Musk’s Twitter feed is usually an echo chamber. He commonly sees, likes and replies to messages which can be about him or are posted from accounts that always act as his cheerleaders, in accordance with a New York Occasions assessment of his exercise on the platform.

To be able to assess how the social community might evolve underneath Mr. Musk’s watch, The Occasions reviewed almost 20,000 of his public tweets, analyzing posts from latest years and pictures he printed over the previous decade, in addition to the comparatively small variety of customers that he follows.

What Mr. Musk says on Twitter has an enormous attain, now greater than ever: His viewers is without doubt one of the largest, with almost 128 million accounts following him. It’s the place he solicits recommendation, conducts polls, condemns censorship and proclaims sweeping coverage modifications on the platform. As an influence person who now controls the corporate — he just lately known as himself the “chief twit” — Mr. Musk has vowed to remake the social community in his imaginative and prescient.

Of the 178 accounts that Mr. Musk adopted as of Tuesday, most have been associated to his companies, or have expressed admiration of his enterprise model, the Occasions assessment discovered. The listing is closely male: Solely two dozen that aren’t institutional or organizational accounts belong to ladies. He’s associated to 2 of them — his mom, Maye, and sister, Tosca — and was married to a 3rd.

Amid discussions of Twitter insurance policies, web satellites from SpaceX and Tesla software program updates, his posts have a freewheeling high quality to them. He traffics in juvenile humor and vulgar jokes (photos of tape dispensers laid in sexual positions), scientific marvels (the Massive Hadron Collider), common topics on far-right websites (Pepe the Frog) and critiques of divisive cultural points (“I’m not brainwashed!!”).

Mr. Musk’s posting model is conversational, and commonly satirical. He messages with former Democratic cupboard officers, criticizes information organizations and trades barbs with enterprise capitalists.

“The buying of Twitter was an influence transfer, politically,” stated Joan Donovan, the analysis director of the Shorenstein Heart on Media, Politics and Public Coverage at Harvard. “He is without doubt one of the richest males on the planet shopping for a social media firm in a transfer that’s expressly about politics and affect on tradition and on media.”

Usually, his updates are restricted to only memes — joking photographs or movies which can be copied and broadly shared. Many have origins on fringe websites or cryptocurrency message boards which can be common together with his followers. Some are about him. Some look like authentic.

A timeline displaying photographs tweeted by Mr. Musk from 2012 via the top of 2022, in which there’s a rise in photographs shared beginning in 2018 and almost half of these are memes.

Mr. Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark about his exercise. At Twitter, as with lots of his different corporations, Mr. Musk has no conventional press staff. As an alternative, he tweets.

Since he created his account in June 2009, Mr. Musk has posted greater than 21,000 occasions. Lately, that has meant posting all hours of the day, most days of the week.

Mr. Musk has “made himself unignorable by turning into king of Twitter,” Ms. Donovan added.

Over a 48-hour interval in November, a second when he touted report exercise on the social community underneath his management, Mr. Musk posted 60 occasions. His posts included commentary on the collapse of a cryptocurrency and combative responses to critiques about his office insurance policies. In a single occasion, he issued a decree about parody accounts after customers modified their profile names to mimic him.

A lot of his missives rapidly turned common amongst his followers.

48 hours of Elon Musk’s tweets

Circles representing Musk’s tweets are sized by the full retweets, likes, replies and quote tweets in response to what he posted.

A chart of Mr. Musk’s authentic tweets, replies and quote tweets over a two-day interval in November. Sixty tweets are proven, with one tweet getting as many as 513,000 interactions.

“Going ahead, accounts engaged
in parody should embrace ‘parody’ in
their title, not simply in bio.”

“Hit all-time excessive of
energetic customers immediately”

Feedback on the
information that FTX, Sam
Bankman-Fried’s
crypto change,
had collapsed.

“As Twitter pursues the
objective of elevating citizen
journalism, media elite
will strive every part to cease
that from taking place”

Posts “🪦🤖️” together with a standing of
“Quickly,” indicating his intention to
take away bots from the platform.

One other Sam
Bankman-Fried
meme.

Calls out critic of
Twitter workplace coverage,
claiming publish was
false.

5:51 p.m. on November 10
“Going ahead, accounts
engaged in parody should
embrace ‘parody’ of their
title, not simply in bio.”

11:30 p.m.
“Fairly the day!”

12:34 a.m.
“Hit all-time excessive of
energetic customers immediately”

7:30 a.m. on Nov. 11
The Reuters Twitter
account shared a
story about Tesla.
5 minutes later,
Mr. Musk replied,
“False.”

9:30 a.m.
“As Twitter pursues the objective of
elevating citizen journalism,
media elite will strive every part
to cease that from taking place”

Afternoon
Mr. Musk started discussing the collapse of the crypto change FTX. His posts included memes of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s face.

He later posted “🪦🤖️” together with a standing of “Quickly,”indicating his intention to take away bots from the platform.

The following morning, he posted
one other Sam Bankman-Fried meme.

3:54 p.m.
Mr. Musk known as out a critic of
Twitter’s distant work coverage,
condemning what he posted
as “false.”

At 5:51 p.m. on Nov. 10, Mr. Musk tweeted, “Going ahead, accounts engaged in parody should embrace ‘parody’ of their title, not simply in bio.”

11:30 p.m.
“Fairly the day!”

12:34 a.m.
In a reply to himself, Mr. Musk stated:
“Hit all-time excessive of energetic customers immediately”

At 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 11 the Reuters Twitter
account shared a narrative about Tesla. 5 minutes
later, Mr. Musk replied, “False.” He then opined on
how he’ll make legacy journalism out of date,
utilizing his favourite 🤣 emoji a number of occasions in jokes
and replies with followers.

9:30 a.m.
“As Twitter pursues the objective of
elevating citizen journalism,
media elite will strive every part
to cease that from taking place”

Within the afternoon, Mr. Musk started discussing the
collapse of the massive crypto change FTX. His
posts included memes of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s face.

At roughly 11:30 p.m., Mr. Musk tweeted
“🪦🤖️” with the standing “Quickly”, seemingly
referencing the elimination of bots on the
platform, a frequent preoccupation of his.

After a virtually 10-hour break, Mr. Musk
returned to replying to his followers.

At 11:12 a.m. he tweeted one other
meme about Mr. Sam Bankman-Fried.

3:54 p.m.
Mr. Musk known as out a critic of Twitter’s distant
work coverage, condemning what he posted as “false.”

Notes: All occasions are in Pacific Time.

It’s unclear precisely what Mr. Musk sees in his feed. The precise sequence relies on whether or not he has chosen to obtain algorithmic suggestions or simply tweets from accounts he follows. (He has beforehand tweeted that individuals are being “manipulated by the algorithm.”)

His exercise more and more consists of replying to customers who’ve talked about him. When he responds to accounts that he doesn’t observe, he regularly chooses people who have complimented or praised him: In dozens of situations over the previous six months, in accordance with the Occasions evaluation, he has replied to tweets from customers whose account descriptions point out that they help or put money into corporations owned by Mr. Musk, or that they’re followers of his management.

Elevate your hand in the event you suppose @ElonMusk ought to make public all inside discussions in regards to the determination to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer earlier than the 2020 Election within the curiosity of Transparency.

7:17 PM · Nov 23, 2022

Elon Musk likes to reply

Eight-week rolling common of Musk’s tweets, quote tweets and replies

A chart exhibits Mr. Musk tweeting with growing frequency since he joined the platform in 2010, with a marked rise starting in 2018, particularly within the variety of replies. On the finish of 2022, he was averaging over 25 replies a day, his highest common ever.

05101520 tweets
201220142016201820202022
Replies
Authentic tweets
Quote tweets

Notice: Contains tweets via the top of 2022.

There are occasions when he second guesses what he broadcasts.

Over the previous two years, he has deleted lots of of tweets inside hours of posting them. In accordance with the PolitiTweet web site, which archives all of Mr. Musk’s tweets, he has additionally deleted dozens of tweets within the months since he acquired Twitter.

On Nov. 14, for instance, Mr. Musk tweeted that he could be “working and sleeping” at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco till the location was fastened.

I’ve been at Twitter SF HQ all evening. Will likely be working & sleeping right here till org is fastened.

6:14 AM · Nov 14, 2022

An internet site monitoring Mr. Musk’s non-public jet motion advised that he traveled away from San Francisco round that point. He deleted the tweet 18 hours after first posting it.

However for an individual with as giant a follower base as Mr. Musk has, deleting tweets might do little to alter how broadly seen or influential these posts develop into when they’re first printed.

“Hundreds of thousands of individuals see his tweets, not many will discover when they’re deleted,” Ms. Donovan stated.

Many tweets which have landed Mr. Musk in scorching water stay on-line.

In 2018, just a few weeks after Mr. Musk had smoked marijuana throughout an on-camera interview for Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla non-public at $420 a share.

Specialists started to query whether or not his total feed was being produced in jest, and identified the repeated marijuana references in his tweets (together with his proposed funding value).

That incident led to prices from the Securities and Alternate Fee, and later a settlement that included monitoring of what Mr. Musk might publish about Tesla on Twitter. Shareholders are actually additionally in search of billions of {dollars} in damages in a lawsuit after Mr. Musk’s takeover proposal by no means materialized.

Final week, Mr. Musk joined an investor name as Tesla reported its latest quarterly earnings, which confirmed a good bounce in earnings regardless of a rising listing of issues plaguing the corporate. The automaker’s combined efficiency final 12 months had led many to query whether or not Mr. Musk’s focus and a spotlight on Twitter had meant that he was neglecting his duties at Tesla.

Mr. Musk deflected that criticism on the earnings name, suggesting that his tens of millions of Twitter followers have been an indication of his recognition.

“I may not be common with some individuals,” he stated, “however for the overwhelming majority of individuals, my follower depend speaks for itself.”

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