🌊 X Isn’t Real Life

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In The Bots Looking for a Civil War, we highlighted that some researchers believe that half of the accounts on X are from bots. If you doubted that beforehand, you can hardly doubt it now. We encourage you to visit the comment sections of the most divisive accounts – and see just how many are pretending to be Americans. 

In some cases, they’re bots operated by a foreign actor; in other cases, they’re accounts managed by real people living in Hungary, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere. Either way, you’re being fooled – and sometimes comically so.

This week, I saw this post on my main feed. At first glance, it looks like a real girl, though upon closer inspection you’ll recognize that it’s photoshopped (in this case, of ex-LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne). The author of the account, as I discovered after a few takes, is in Pakistan. You have a Pakistani male posing as an SEC blonde to make hundreds of thousands of American men drool. Sadly, for years, it’s worked.

We will likely be seeing new data in the coming days about the number of international accounts posing as Americans. But what we know now is this: X is posing as reality, not reality itself. 

In the late 2010s – when Twitter skewed woke, young, and educated – a slogan bubbled up from the techno-responsible, Jonathan Haidt crowd that simply stated: Twitter isn’t real life.

“Only about 22 percent of U.S. adults are on Twitter, and 80 percent of the tweets come from 10 percent of users,” Harvard professor Arthur Brooks wrote in a 2019 op-ed. “If you rely on Twitter for political information, you are being informed by ersatz pundits (and propaganda bots) residing within 2.2 percent of the population.”

Twitter was much different then. Hall monitor types at the social networking site’s San Francisco HQ crafted algorithms that aligned with their politics and had shrunk the Overton window – the range of views deemed socially acceptable – substantially. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey admitted in a 2018 internal note: “It’s no secret that we are largely left leaning, and we all have biases... That includes me, our board, and our company.”

A 2022 Project Veritas video showed a Twitter engineer revealing that the company "does not believe in free speech” and censors the right but not the left. The ban of Trump, censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, shadow banning of right-wing accounts, restriction of Covid discourse, and compliance with government requests for account bans and post removals.

Then Elon bought the site, flung the Overton window wide open, and changed the platform overnight. It’s no longer a snarky, left-leaning platform that worships expertise and restricts conspiracy theories; it’s become the opposite – a right-leaning site that denigrates expertise and amplifies conspiracy theories. 

Weeks into his tenure, Musk restored over 62,000 previously suspended accounts in what he called a “general amnesty.” He also relaxed content moderation policies, eased account verification standards, and grew his own following to 229M followers, making it by far the site’s largest. Musk has leveraged his account to directly promote or engage with conspiracy theories and right-wing narratives, from the Springfield pet-eating story to the litter boxes outside middle-school classroom narratives. 

While Musk made some positive changes – particularly those relaxing content moderation policies that whitelisted news accounts could avoid – he’s made X into its own echo chamber; a digital cesspool, even. 

While writing this, I just opened X and refreshed my “For You” tab. The first post is a graphic that reads: “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.” Elon Musk reposted the graphic with the caption, “Exactly.”

I kept scrolling and saw toxic exchanges between the pro- and anti-Israel conservative factions, followed by absurd conspiracy theories. Among the “debates” on my feed are ones about who really killed Charlie Kirk, whether the French military has a hit out on Candace Owens, and “who is worse – Jews or Muslims.”  Further down, there are “UNCENSORED” fight videos from a ghetto somewhere, followed by a 20-year-old girl with a teasing picture, an OnlyFans link, and a caption that reads, “Am I pretty?” 

This, of course, isn’t by chance: It’s the result of human-designed algorithms that use engagement levels to decide what you see. Shockingly, humans engage with extreme political takes, porn, culture-war fodder, brain-dead conspiracy theories, Waffle House brawl videos, and a slew of other poisonous, blood pressure-raising content. You leave the site feeling more tribal and cynical than when you opened it. 

Now, you may be thinking, who cares? As noted before, a minority of the population uses X, and it’s not real life. But the X minority is disproportionately influential, with the ability to create virality, capture politicians’ attention, and set a chunk of the societal narrative. For many people, X is increasingly real life.  

This is making politics more emotional than rational, diminishing tolerance for alternative viewpoints, and fueling political extremism. It’s only a matter of time before an X user comes to believe that conservatives are all cold-hearted, knuckle-dragging hicks or that liberals are all purple-haired, mentally ill furries. It’s all manufactured, and yet so convincing. 

But it isn’t real – and the new location feature shows just how profoundly misled we’ve been.