ANALYSIS: X Has Become a Graveyard for Information—and Elon Musk Is Still Digging Deeper

A carefully crafted narrative designed to mask a reversed reality

From the moment he acquired Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk presented himself as the champion of absolute free speech. He reinstated banned accounts. He denounced what he called “censorship” by the former moderation teams. He described Twitter as a “digital public square” and positioned himself as its guardian. The narrative was compelling. It was also deeply misleading.

For what is a public square worth where speech flows freely but evidence is invisible? What is a forum worth where anyone can claim anything, but where someone who posts a link to a well-researched article finds their voice reduced to a whisper? That is not freedom of speech. It is freedom of noise. A freedom calibrated for chaos, not for clarity.

When the owner of the public square decides who will be heard

There’s a difference between giving everyone a voice and ensuring that certain voices are never heard. Musk doesn’t censor in the traditional sense. He doesn’t delete media content. He does something more sophisticated and more dangerous: he makes them invisible. The tweet exists. The link exists. The article exists. But in the algorithmic feed, they’re buried under three meters of native content, memes, controversies, and self-promotional threads.

This is 21st-century censorship: we no longer burn books; we lock them away in a room where no one ever goes.

The Impossible Dilemma Facing Newsrooms

Faced with algorithmic penalties, media outlets are left with only bad choices. First choice: continue publishing links on X and accept plummeting visibility. Second choice: abandon X and lose access to millions of users. The third option—the most perverse—is to adapt to the algorithm by publishing native, link-free content, effectively transforming their journalism into platform-specific content.

This third option is the one Musk is hoping for. It turns media outlets into content creators dependent on his platform, subject to his rules, and optimized for his algorithm. Journalism becomes a byproduct of X, not the other way around. And yet, some newsrooms are already resigning themselves to this—because their audience numbers leave them no room to maneuver.

The Facebook Precedent: A Forgotten Lesson

The media should have remembered 2014–2018. At that time, Facebook had encouraged publishers to post directly on its platform via “Instant Articles.” Media outlets had invested heavily. Then Facebook changed its algorithm, crushing their visibility overnight. Entire newsrooms, built on Facebook traffic, laid off staff en masse. BuzzFeed, Mic, HuffPost—the list of victims is long and never cited by those who are making the same mistake all over again.

X is following exactly the same pattern, with a crueler twist: this time, the platform doesn’t even invite you to publish on it. It simply punishes those who publish elsewhere.

The Illusion of Participatory Fact-Checking

Musk replaced Twitter’s professional moderation system with Community Notes, a participatory system where users themselves verify information. On paper, the idea is democratic. In practice, it is structurally flawed.

Community Notes require a consensus among users on opposing sides to be displayed. As a result, on the most polarizing topics—precisely those where fact-checking is most urgent—no notes appear. A misleading tweet about the conflict in Ukraine, U.S. politics, or climate change can circulate for hours, reach millions of people, and never be corrected. Disinformation doesn’t need to win the debate. It just needs to buy time.

A system that protects the powerful

And yet, this system has another flaw that no one mentions enough. The most-followed accounts—those of Musk himself, political figures, and influencers with millions of followers—rarely receive visible Community Notes. When Musk posts false or misleading information, the corrective note takes hours to appear—if it appears at all. By then, the tweet has been viewed fifty million times. The correction, on the other hand, will be seen by a few tens of thousands of people. The ratio is one to a thousand. That’s not fact-checking. It’s window dressing.

Why the algorithm does exactly what it’s designed to do

It would be naive to believe that penalizing links is an unintended side effect. X’s business model relies on advertising and Premium subscriptions. Both require the same thing: that users stay on the platform as long as possible. A click to a New York Times article means a user leaves X for five, ten, or fifteen minutes. It’s a user who doesn’t see ads. It’s a user who isn’t scrolling. It’s a user who is economically “dead” while they’re getting their news.

The algorithm doesn’t penalize information based on ideology. It penalizes it for financial reasons. Every external link is a loss of revenue. Every shared article is a loss of income. And in a context where X has been losing advertisers since Musk’s takeover, every second of user retention counts more than ever.

News as a Second-Class Product

In X’s current architecture, the content that performs best is the kind that leads nowhere. A controversial thread with no source. A viral video with no context. A cropped screenshot with no attribution. A strong opinion with no evidence whatsoever. This content is perfect for the algorithm: it generates reactions, quotes, and indignant responses—and all of this happens within X, without ever leaving the platform.

Well-researched, sourced information linked to a full article is the exact opposite of this model. It invites users to leave the platform. It invites them to reflect. It invites them to take a step back—three behaviors that X’s algorithm views as existential threats.

The Collapse in Media Traffic Since X

The data is clear. Since the acquisition and subsequent algorithmic changes, referral traffic from X to news sites has plummeted dramatically. Several independent analyses—including those by Chartbeat and the Reuters Institute—have documented a 40% to 60% decline in traffic sent by X to news sites between 2023 and 2026. For some media outlets, X has gone from being the second-largest source of social traffic to a statistically negligible one.

At the same time, overall engagement on X has shifted. The most common interactions are no longer clicks on links—they are replies to controversial tweets, retweets of memes, and subscriptions to Premium creators who publish exclusively native content. The platform that was supposed to be the world’s public square has become a closed shopping mall where people consume content without ever leaving.

The Downward Spiral of Trust

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 had already noted that X was the platform users trusted least for news—behind YouTube, behind TikTok, and even behind Facebook. In 2026, this trend worsened. And the reason is circular: the less reliable information there is on X, the less people trust X as a news source, the less media outlets invest in X, and the less reliable information there is on X. The loop closes like a trap.

The hypothesis that no one dares to voice

There is one interpretation of the situation that most analysts avoid, because it seems too paranoid. But the facts align with it with unsettling regularity. What if the destruction of X’s informational value were not collateral damage caused by algorithmic greed—but an end in itself?

Musk is the richest man in the world. He runs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and xAI. He has direct influence over U.S. politics—he held an unofficial role within the Trump administration through the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). Each of these companies, each of these roles, is best served by a weakened media landscape. The less visible the media are, the less they can investigate. The less they investigate, the less Musk is scrutinized. It’s a logic of industrial self-preservation disguised as technological innovation.

The historical precedent that should send a chill down our spines

Regimes that control information never start by banning newspapers. They start by making them invisible. They reduce their circulation. They cut off their advertising revenue. They saturate the public sphere with noise so that journalists’ voices are lost in the clamor. That’s what Putin did to the independent Russian media. That’s what Orbán did to the Hungarian press. That’s what Modi is doing to the Indian press.

Musk does not run a country. But he runs a platform used by 500 million people. And what he is doing to that platform follows, step by step, the playbook for the gentle neutralization of the free press.

Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads: The Mirage of the Exodus

Every crisis at X—every scandalous decision by Musk, every wave of unmoderated misinformation—triggers a surge in sign-ups on alternative platforms. Bluesky has surpassed 25 million users. Meta’s Threads claims more than 200 million accounts. Mastodon continues to thrive in its decentralized niche. But none of these platforms has managed to replace what Twitter was at its peak: a space where information spread faster than misinformation.

The problem isn’t technical. It’s sociological. Users stay on X for the same reason they stay in a polluted city: because their contacts are there, because habits are ingrained, because the cost of moving seems to always outweigh the cost of staying in that toxic environment. And yet, every day spent on X is a day when the algorithm decides what you see, what you don’t see, and—by extension—what you believe you know about the world.

The Responsibility of Institutions

Governments, international organizations, and universities continue to post on X as if nothing had changed. The UN posts its alerts there. The Élysée Palace disseminates its press releases there. Researchers share their work there. By remaining on X, each of these institutions legitimizes a platform that undermines the very foundations of public information. It’s a paradox that no one wants to confront: the guardians of democracy are, through their presence, funding an ecosystem that erodes that very same democracy.

A diagnosis that comes late—but comes nonetheless

The fact that BFM Business has devoted an article to X’s uselessness for following the news is in itself a newsworthy event. For years, the French media have treated X with an embarrassing deference. They’ve invested human resources, budgets, and community management strategies in it. Acknowledging that the platform has become “virtually useless” for news means admitting that these investments were—at best—misplaced. At worst, they helped feed the beast that’s devouring them.

But this assessment, however belated it may be, has the merit of putting the right words to the right problem. X is not a news platform that’s malfunctioning. It’s an entertainment and polarization platform that has stopped pretending to be anything else. The algorithm doesn’t penalize links by accident. It penalizes them because news isn’t its product—you are.

The question the media must now ask itself

And yet, the real issue isn’t X. The real issue is the media’s structural dependence on platforms they don’t control. That X is hostile to news is a symptom. The disease is a media business model that has delegated its distribution—and thus its survival—to companies whose interests are diametrically opposed to its own. Regaining control of distribution is the only viable strategy. Everything else is just tinkering on a sinking ship.

The Day Information Became an Obstacle to Engagement

Future communication textbooks will include a chapter on the period from 2022 to 2026. This chapter will recount how the world’s richest man acquired the world’s most influential news platform and methodically transformed it into a space where information is an algorithmic hindrance. This chapter will also recount how hundreds of millions of people continued to use this platform, knowing full well that what they saw there was sorted, filtered, and distorted by an algorithm designed to maximize their screen time, not their understanding of the world.

And this chapter will pose the question we refuse to ask ourselves today: at what point did we decide that our right to be informed was worth less than a billionaire’s right to monetize our attention?

The Choice That Remains

It’s not too late. It’s never too late to refuse. To refuse to scroll through a feed that’s been algorithmically stripped of substance. To refuse to treat an unsourced tweet as news. To refuse to entrust the circulation of the truth to a man whose financial and political interests demand precisely that this truth circulate as little as possible.

X has become virtually useless for following the news. But it’s not the platform that’s to blame. It’s our collective tolerance for its deterioration. We had a tool. We let it become a weapon. And now, we watch as this weapon is aimed at free information, wondering how this happened. We know how. We watched. We stayed.

The graveyard of information has a guardian. His name is Elon. And he never locks the gate—he simply makes sure no one finds their way out.

Five Truths We Can No Longer Ignore

First truth: X’s algorithm deliberately and structurally penalizes external links—and therefore the media. This isn’t a bug—it’s at the heart of the model.

Second truth: The freedom of speech Musk champions is a freedom to make noise, not a freedom of information. Speaking without evidence isn’t freedom—it’s organized chaos.

Third truth: Community Notes are no substitute for professional moderation. They offer an illusion of accountability that protects the powerful and abandons the vulnerable.

Fourth truth: Media outlets that remain dependent on X for distribution are funding their own obsolescence. The Facebook precedent should have been enough.

Fifth truth: The deterioration of X as a news platform is not a technological problem. It is a democratic problem. And democratic problems are not solved with a better algorithm—they are solved with better choices by citizens.

The final word belongs to the readers

Every time you open X to “see what’s happening in the world,” you aren’t seeing what’s happening in the world. You’re seeing what an algorithm—designed by a billionaire with multiple interests—decides to show you. The difference between the two is the difference between being informed and being held captive.

And yet—and this may be the most important thing to remember—you still have a choice. The choice to seek out information where it truly exists. The choice to pay for journalism that doesn’t depend on a hostile algorithm. The choice to leave a platform that has clearly and openly decided that your right to know is worth less than your screen time.

That choice is yours. For now.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost